Correction: A Novel by Thomas Bernhard Read Free Book Online Page B

America, I heard what Roithamer said at the time as though he were saying it now, his voice exactly, with its rising and falling inflections, his characteristic pauses, the way he would slow down as he spoke and then speed up again, and in addition there was, that time in England, the impact of his discovery of Hoeller’s garret as the ideal place for him, everything about Hoeller’s garret was new to him then, and so Roithamer described Hoeller’s garret to me in that tone of voice in which one imparts an incredible piece of news, as incredible as it is staggering, stressing again and again that Hoeller’s garret was perhaps, and probably, his greatest and most important find, probably the most important for his survival , as he insisted, in the second half of his life, his existence, which he had basically been done with long since, he kept on and on about nothing but Hoeller’s garret which we both knew about, of course, because we had often watched Hoeller’s house going up in the Aurach gorge while it was still under construction, but at the time it was being built in the Aurach gorge we could not possibly have had any inkling of its now suddenly manifest significance, a significance and importance Hoeller’s garret could only have achieved. through Roithamer, for whom it suddenly became, during his first stay in it, that first night, when he frequently got up from his bed to walk over to the desk which then as now stood by the window, that writing table which had never been intended as a desk in the first place, not even as a student’s desk, it was an heirloom that somehow came into Hoeller’s possession from the Gmunden widow of an engineer involved in the damming up of the mountain stream, Hoeller didn’t know what to do with it and so he put it in the garret after it had simply been in the way for a long time inside the house, as is so often the case with so many heirlooms that fall into one’s hands, it was always in the way, so Hoeller suddenly hit upon the idea of putting the desk, a simple desk with a maple top, into Hoeller’s garret, the desk was of absolutely no significance until the moment Roithamer got up out of bed that first night he spent in Hoeller’s garret and walked over and sat down at it, and Roithamer had told me that the idea of building the Cone had come to him at this desk, at the moment when he first sat down at this desk , suddenly, as I sat down at the desk, I had the idea of building my sister the Cone, to give her the greatest happiness, as he immediately felt it would, and from that moment on the idea of making his sister supremely happy, by building her a cone to live in, had given him no peace and right there, sitting at that desk where I had never sat before, so said Roithamer, I made a vow to carry out this idea of building the Cone, to build it entirely on my own, out of my own head, to make it into an actuality, and that same night I started to make notes and draw sketches, on that very desk, sketches of the Cone and even the idea for the site of the Cone, namely, the dead center of the Kobernausser forest, came to me in those first moments while I was making notes and drawing sketches, the Cone must be situated in the dead center of the Kobernausser forest, I said to myself over and over, while I was already at work on the first sketches, the first notes, concerning the size and the height and the depth and the width of the Cone, the statics involved, since the building of the Cone is primarily a problem of statics, I thought, and I then spent all night sitting at that desk drafting sketches and notes, it was four in the morning before it dawned on me that I was actually exhausted, those sketches and notes, he told me that time in England, while he was describing Hoeller’s garret, were the basic sketches and notes for the Cone which I subsequently drew on repeatedly during the six years I worked on the Cone, those first sketches and notes were the most important,