us or only sentences with es, or only rather long sentences with os, or only short sentences. Looking out the window, for instance, and taking a deep breath, he knew what today’s experiment should be. Or else, standing by the window, he would decide momentarily: now, up to her room and say to her quickly: swarms of birds, more and more swarms make the park swarthy, and demand her instant comment on this. On Christmas Eve, exactly a year before her violent death, he had gone to her room at about five o’clock and repeated to her the sentence: Mingling with men and women one only messes oneself up the more, saying it alternately into her right and her left ear. He said that he murmured this sentence into her ears eighty or ninety times, and exacted a comment on it every time, until she collapsed in a coma, it never occurred to him until nearly eleven P.M. that it was, after all, Christmas Eve. She had forgotten all about it on account of being so intensely preoccupied with the Urbanchich exercises, and he had failed to remind her, and so they both went to bed that night at about one A.M. without his remembering to mention it to her, next day he is supposed to have said to her: Tonight is Christmas Eve, actually it was yesterday but for us it is Christmas Eve today, of course I knew it was Christmas Eve yesterday but I didn’t draw it to your attention because we were in the midst of our experiments, so it will have to be Christmas Eve for us today, he is supposed to have said, and then she said: You terrible man! this “Terrible man!” Wieser says Konrad mimicked, using exactly her tone of voice. She often believed that there were times when he was not experimenting with her, Konrad, is supposed to have told Wieser, though in fact he was experimenting incessantly, even when he was merely saying Good Morning, or Good Night, when he asked her whether she wanted to change, or needed him to comb her hair, or was interested in eating something, he was always experimenting with her. He might ask her: Shall I read Novalis to you? but he was actually experimenting. Whether he was standing up or sitting down, pacing the floor, keeping silence, he was always consciously experimenting. His whole relationship with her was nothing else than one continuous experiment, Konrad is supposed to have said to Fro. To the works inspector: “Using the Urbanchich method, I am experimenting her (his wife) to death.” Of course her earache grew worse, it went without saying that the pain in her ear would gradually spread to her whole head, since he was intensifying his experimentation, moving on to ever harder, ever more strenuous exercises, he is supposed to have told Fro. What worked the most in his favor was that all the people with whom he experimented, meaning everybody he had anything to do with, had no inkling of the fact that he was experimenting with them whenever he was with them, and not only then. For a whole year he studied only the effects on the hearing of scratching sounds, slaps, drilling, drops, sounds of a rushing, whirring, humming sort, he is supposed to have told Fro. Blowing sounds. He had tried out hundreds of thousands of scraping noises. Her receptivity for twelve-tone music, he is supposed to have told Fro, had played the most important part in his experiments, including the orchestral works of Webern, Schoenberg’s Moses and Aaron, the string quartets of Béla Bartok, all kinds of music. But it was all done with a view to the book as a whole; how easy it would be for a dilettante to fritter himself away, lose himself in a sea of details, Konrad is supposed to have said. To keep everything relating to the sense of hearing under surveillance simultaneously required a nearly superhuman effort. Why, his researches into the auditory sense of various kinds of animals alone had taken him not less than two years, supposedly. Konrad might often let a whole hour go by without letting his wife know that he was experimenting, only to say suddenly: Hearing Experiment I, get ready to go, and then the words lust, lost, least, followed by a so-called auditory sound-color control quiz: Is the u a somber sound? Is the o somber? Is the e somber? He often followed this up with the word streamlet, the purest word of all. He had experimented with the word streamlet for ten years, he is supposed to have told Wieser. Fro: the following procedure was repeated every day: Konrad went into his wife’s room and said something, on which she had to comment. He would accept no so-called excuses. Sometimes she dared to ask him a question, such as: Is this an experiment or not? and he would answer Yes, or No, because she believed that there were times when he was not experimenting, not knowing that he was experimenting incessantly, that to him everything was an experiment. Even though he had the whole book quite finished in his head, as he believed, he never ceased experimenting, so as to complete his work even further, to perfect it, even though it was quite complete in his head already, and although he might at any moment sit down and write it all up without fear that he did not have it fully worked out in his head, if the possibility of suddenly writing it all down should arise. He was simply filling up the time with experiments until the moment arrived, as he confidently and unwaveringly believed it would, when he would finally write it down. Once such a piece of work had been embarked upon, it was possible to do all that could be done with the Urbanchich method, he is supposed to have told Fro. His kind of experimentation, pursued for such a long time, could not suddenly be dropped without ruining everything. Without his wife, who had sacrificed herself to him entirely, he would never have the entire book worked out in his head as firmly as he did. Every day, every moment, it was she alone who made it all possible. Demonstrations of fact, again and yet again, were what made the book possible. The experimenter, he felt, had to go on experimenting, that was his job, until he ceased asking himself why he was experimenting, a question it was not his province to ask himself, he was supposed to experiment himself to death if necessary. It was simpler to experiment with short sentences, he is supposed to have said, even simpler than that to use single words, simplest of all to use vowels only. It was more complicated, more strenuous, especially, of course, for his wife, to work with long composite sentences, the longest, most intricately complex sentences, the kind it admittedly gave him the greatest pleasure to experiment with, or such sentences as this, for example: The connections which, as you know, are quite independent of the interconnection of the whole, but are nevertheless connected, in the most delicate ways, with the connections of the connection which is independent of the interconnection, and so forth. You could say, of course, that the whole thing was crazy, but then you would have to say that everything was crazy, which is the simple truth, that everything is in fact crazy, still, nobody would dare say such a thing because, if he did, everyone would say he was crazy, which could only lead to everything coming to an end, everything gradually coming to a stop of its own accord, Konrad is supposed to have said. Human beings (all mankind) owed their very existence, after all, to inconsistency (the utmost). As for himself, Konrad, there was nothing left that meant anything to him except experimental sentences, he is supposed to have said, experimentation was all there was, all he cared about, the whole world was an experiment, everything was; and then he is supposed to have said: It’s not so much the length of the sentences that matters, nor the brevity of sentences (or words) that is decisive, not just, for instance, the