As the reason for his brother’s suicide, a doctor in Wels—with whom I once went to primary school and who was compelled by the practice of medicine increasingly to abandon his intellectual and artistic talents as he became absorbed in his profession as a total speculation in the human body—suggested that his brother had suffered all his life from having come to know a person he described as a highly talented female musician and concert pianist who gradually oppressed and finally suppressed his talents, which were really extraordinary, which reminded me of that unfortunate genius, Robert Schumann.

Respect

RESPECT

Our respect for a writer whom we never in our life dared approach was without doubt at its peak when we stayed in the same hotel in which the writer whom we admired had been living for some time, and were introduced on the hotel terrace one day—through the good offices of a friend—to the man we admired. We can remember no better example of the fact that to approach actually means nothing more than to withdraw. The closer we came to our writer after the first meeting, the more we distanced ourselves from him—and with the same intensity—and the more we got to know his personality, the more we distanced ourselves from his works; every word he spoke to us, every thought he thought about us, distanced us from that same word and that same thought in his works. He finally disgusted us totally, took us apart, dissolved us, and put us back together again. When we left the hotel—and the only thing that made us happy about that was that we could still make do without the writer—we had the impression that the writer had destroyed his personality in our eyes just as he had his work. The author of those hundreds of thoughts and ideas and perceptions, whom we had served for decades with our understanding and to whom we had been loyal in our love, had, by not refusing our acquaintance but ultimately by seeking it against our will, destroyed his works. Whenever we heard his name after that, we were repelled.

Genius

GENIUS