Correction

by Thomas Bernhard

  “personality.” It was amazing, every time, how many people go to England early in life, and very often at exactly the right moment, for a chance to develop, and almost all of those who went to England made something of themselves, they became distinguished personalities, at this point I used the expression distinguished personalities deliberately, to convince Hoeller, just as Roithamer himself in England became a really distinguished personality, a so-called distinguished personality, because every personality is distinguished, I said, but what the world means by a distinguished personality is something else, which is why I now speak of a so-called distinguished personality. Because he went to England at the right moment, in the right, the ideal circumstances, I said. Had the idea of building the Cone not surfaced, he would still be in England today, but his life had to turn out as it has, in fact, turned out, the idea of the Cone brought his life to a new high-point, the highest possible in fact, I now said, the six years he spent on the Cone were undoubtedly the high-point of Roithamer’s life, certainly the perfecting of the Cone was. At the moment he had finished, perfected, the Cone, he had to put a period to his own life, with the Cone perfected, Roithamer’s existence had come to .1 close, that’s what he felt and that’s why he put an end to his life, with the perfecting of the Cone two lives had lost their justification, they had to cease, I said to Hoeller and looked again at the two death notices on the opposite wall to the ‘left and right of the door, the life of Roithamer himself and that of his sister, which he had uncompromisingly bound up with his own life. The time had possibly come now, I thought, to say what I had actually wanted to say before, but had put off saying because it had, seemed premature, reverting to our walks to school I tried to test Hoeller’s memory, I imagined that Hoeller’s memory was as good and as clear as my own, but after all Hoeller is an entirely different kind of man and no two people are the same in any respect, on that assumption I began to remind him of details along our common path to school, beginning with certain characteristic, striking rock formations jutting out into the road, then the less striking, less characteristic ones, then I recalled the odors at certain points along the way, plant odors, earth odors, our path was characterized by constant changes in earth odors and rock odors and plant odors, certain birds’ nests, bird swarms, bird species, I kept testing Hoeller’s memory in general using objects such as, for example, had been tossed into the Aurach and left lying there by all sorts of passersby, old bicycle parts, cans, boxes, mill wheels, all of which I remembered vividly, I questioned him about remarks I had made frequently and others I’d made less frequently on the way to school, about all sorts of things, about remarks made by Roithamer, too, about encounters along the way, for example in the Aurach gorge where formerly, during our grade school days, the gypsies often made camp, we were afraid of them because we had been told that gypsies kidnapped children, the more the better, about reflections in the air, on the grass, and most of all on the riverbank, about peculiarities in the bark of the trees, about certain oddities in the behavior of the animals particularly along this stretch of our way to school along the Aurach, did he remember how I, together with him and Roithamer, had once discovered twelve frozen deer among the trees and pulled them together in a heap, how we suddenly, yielding to an impulse when halfway between my home and our school, decided to cut school and went instead to the abandoned mill standing where today there is nothing but an overgrown hole in the ground, like a bomb-crater, and anyway, did he remember certain things along the way that had to do with the war and how we lived in fear all that time, and I found that Hoeller remembered everything or almost everything that I still remembered.