massive mistake in and about every single one of them, a procedure which so far has always attained its objective of turning that so-called perfect work of art into a fragment, he said. The perfect not only threatens us ceaselessly with our ruin, it also ruins everything that is hanging on these walls under the label of masterpiece. I proceed from the assumption that there is no such thing as the perfect or the whole, and each time I have made a fragment of one of the so-called perfect works of art hanging here on the walls by searching for a massive mistake in and about that work of art, for the crucial point of failure by the artist who made that work of art, searching for it until I found it, I have got one step further. In every one of these paintings, these so-called masterpieces, I have found and uncovered a massive mistake, the failure of its creator. For over thirty years this, as you might think, infamous calculation has come out right. Not one of these world-famous masterpieces, no matter by whom, is in fact whole or perfect. That reassures me. It makes me basically happy. Only when, time and again, we have discovered that there is no such thing as the whole or the perfect are we able to live on. We cannot endure the whole or the perfect. We have to travel to Rome to discover that Saint Peter's is a tasteless concoction, that Bernini's altar is an architectural nonsense. We have to see the Pope face to face and personally discover that all in all he is just as helpless and grotesque a person as anyone else in order to bear it. We have to listen to Bach and hear how he fails, listen to Beethoven and hear how he fails, even listen to Mozart and hear how he fails. And we have to deal in the same way with the so-called great philosophers, even if they are our favourite spiritual artists, he said. After all, we do not love Pascal because he is so perfect but because he is fundamentally so helpless, just as we love Montaigne for his helplessness in lifelong searching and failing to find, and Voltaire for his helplessness. We only love philosophy and the humanities generally because they are absolutely helpless. We truly love only those books which are not a whole, which are chaotic, which are helpless. The same is true of everything and everybody, Reger said, we only feel particularly attached to a person because he is helpless and not a whole, because he is chaotic and not perfect. Yes, I say, El Greco, fine, but the good man did not know how to paint a hand! and I say Veronese, fine, but the good man of course did not know how to paint a natural face. And what I said to you about the fugue today, he was saying yesterday, not one of all the composers, even the greatest, composed a perfect one, not even Bach, who surely was tranquillity itself and pure compositional clarity. There is no perfect picture and there is no perfect book and there is no perfect piece of music, Reger said, that is the truth, and this truth makes it possible for a mind like mine, which all its life was nothing but a desperate mind, to go on existing. One's mind has to be a searching mind, a mind searching for mistakes, for the mistakes of humanity, a mind searching for failure. The human mind is a human mind only when it searches for the mistakes of humanity. The human mind is not a human mind unless it sets out to search for the mistakes of humanity, Reger said. A good mind is a mind that searches for the mistakes of humanity and an exceptional mind is a mind which finds these mistakes of humanity, and a genius's mind is a mind which, having found these mistakes, points them out and with all the means at its disposal shows up these mistakes. In this sense, moreover, Reger said, the always unthinkingly uttered dictum of Seek and you shall find is found to be true. Anyone searching in this museum for mistakes in these hundreds of so-called masterpieces will also find them, Reger said. No work in this museum is free from mistakes, I say. You may smile at this, he said, it may alarm you, and it makes me happy. And there is of course a reason why I have, for over thirty years, been going to the Kunsthistorisches Museum and not to the Science Museum across the road. He was still sitting on the settee, with his black hat on his head, quite motionless, and it was obvious that for a long time now he had been contemplating not the White-Bearded Man but something entirely different behind the White-Bearded Man, not Tintoretto but something far outside the museum, while I myself was admittedly regarding Reger and the White-Bearded Man and yet was seeing behind it the Reger who had explained the fugues to me the day before. I had heard him explain the fugues so often before that I did not feel like listening to him attentively yesterday, and although I followed what he was saying, and it was most interesting, for instance what he had to say about Schumann's attempts at the fugue, I had been quite elsewhere with my thoughts. I saw Reger sitting on the settee and beyond it the White-Bearded Man, and I saw Reger once again, with even greater affection than before, trying to elucidate to me the art of the fugue, and I heard what Reger was saying and yet I was gazing into my childhood and heard the voices of my childhood, the voices of my brothers and sisters, the voice of my mother, the voices of my grandparents in the country. As a child I used to be quite happy in the country, but I was always happy back in town again, just as later and to this day I am far happier in the city than in the country. Just as I have always been far happier in art than in nature, nature has, all my life, been uncanny to me, while in art I have always felt secure. Even in my childhood, which I predominantly spent in the care of my maternal grandparents, and when, taken all in all, I was really happy, I have always felt secure and at home in the so-called world of the arts, not in nature, which I have always admired but always just as much feared, and this has not changed to this day, I do not feel at home for a moment in nature, but always so in the world of the arts, and the most secure of all in the world of music. As far as I can think back, I have loved nothing more in the world than music, I reflected, looking right through Reger, out of the museum and into my childhood. I always love these perspectives into my long-past childhood and I surrender to them totally and I exploit them in whatever way I can, may this perspective of my childhood never end, I always reflect. What kind of childhood did Reger have? I reflected, I do not know much about it, Reger is not communicative about his childhood. And Irrsigler? He does not like talking about it, nor does he like looking back to it. Towards noon more and more people come to the museum in groups, lately an extraordinary number from the East European countries, for several days running I saw groups from Soviet Georgia, driven through the gallery by Russian-speaking guides, driven is the right word, because these groups do not walk through the museum, they rush through it, hustled, and basically totally uninterested, totally exhausted by all the impressions which bombarded them on their journey to Vienna. Last week I observed a man from Tbilisi who had detached himself from one of the Caucasian groups and had tried to make his way through the museum on his own, a painter as it turned out, who asked me about Gainsborough; I was able to oblige him and tell him where to find Gainsborough. In the end his group had already left the museum when he approached me and asked me about the