About Glenn Gould, under no circumstances would I have interrupted this work, for then I would have botched it and I didn’t want to risk that, so I didn’t answer Wertheimer’s card, which struck me as curious even as I was reading it. Wertheimer got the idea of flying to America to attend Glenn’s funeral, I however refused, and he wouldn’t fly alone. It took me three days after Wertheimer hanged himself to figure out that, like Glenn, he had just turned fifty-one. When we cross the threshold of our fiftieth year we see ourselves as base and spineless, I thought, the question is how long we can stand this condition. Lots of people kill themselves in their fifty-first year, I thought. Lots in their fifty-second, but more in their fifty-first. It doesn’t matter whether they kill themselves in their fifty-first year or whether they die, as people say, a natural death, it doesn’t matter whether they die like Glenn or whether they die like Wertheimer. The reason is that they’re often ashamed of having reached the limit that a fifty-year-old crosses when he puts his fiftieth year behind him. For fifty years are absolutely enough, I thought. We become contemptible when we go past fifty and are still living, continue our existence. We’re border-crossing weaklings, I thought, who have made ourselves twice as pitiful by putting fifty years behind us. Now I’m the shameless one, I thought. I envied the dead. For a moment I hated them for their superiority. I considered it a lapse of judgment on my part to have traveled to Traich out of simple curiosity, the cheapest of all motives, while standing in the inn, disgusted by the inn, I disgusted myself most of all. And who knows, I thought, whether someone in the hunting lodge will even let me in, without a doubt the new owners are already there, as I know, for Wertheimer always described his relatives to me in such a way that I had to assume they hated me as much as they did him and that they considered me now, probably rightly, as the most ill-mannered of busy-bodies, I thought. I should have flown back to Madrid and never undertaken this completely useless trip to Traich, I thought. I’ve got a lot of nerve, I thought. I suddenly felt like a grave-robber with my plan to look at the hunting lodge and enter every room in the hunting lodge, leaving no stone unturned and developing my own theories about it. I’m an awful person, hideous, revolting, I thought when I wanted to call the innkeeper but in the last moment didn’t call her, all at once I was afraid she could come too early, that is appear too early for my purposes, disturb my thinking, wipe out the thoughts I’d suddenly had here, these Glenn- and Wertheimer-digressions which I had suddenly indulged in. I actually had planned and still plan to look over the writings that Wertheimer may have left behind. Wertheimer often spoke of writings he had been working on over the years. A lot of nonsense, as Wertheimer put it, but he was also arrogant, which led me to assume that this nonsense might be rather valuable, would at least contain Wertheimerian thoughts worth preserving, collecting, saving, ordering, I thought, and already I could see an entire stack of notebooks (and notes) containing more or less mathematical, philosophical observations. But his heirs won’t fork over these notebooks (and notes), all these writings (and notes), I thought. They’re not even going to let me in the hunting lodge. They’re going to ask who I am and as soon as I tell them who I am they’ll slam the door in my face. My reputation is so abominable they will slam their doors shut and lock them, I thought. This crazy idea of visiting the hunting lodge had already occurred to me in Madrid. It’s possible that Wertheimer never told anyone but me about his writings (and notes), I thought, and tucked them away somewhere, so I owe it to him to dig out these notebooks and writings (and notes) and preserve them, no matter how difficult it proves to be. Glenn actually left nothing behind, Glenn didn’t keep any kind of written record, I thought, Wertheimer on the contrary never stopped writing, for years, for decades. Above all I’ll find this or that interesting observation about Glenn, I thought, at least something about the three of us, about our student years, about our teachers, about our development and about the development of the entire world, I thought as I stood in the inn and looked out the kitchen window, behind which however I could see nothing, for the windowpanes were black with filth. They cook in this filthy kitchen, I thought, from this filthy kitchen they bring out the food to the customers in the restaurant, I thought. Austrian inns are all filthy and unappetizing, I thought, one can barely get a clean tablecloth in one of these inns, never mind cloth napkins, which in Switzerland for instance are quite standard. Even the tiniest inn in Switzerland is clean and appetizing, even our finest Austrian hotels are filthy and unappetizing. And talk about the rooms! I thought. Often they just iron over sheets that have already been slept in, and it’s not uncommon to find clumps of hair in the sink from the previous guest. Austrian inns have always turned my stomach, I thought. The plates aren’t clean and upon closer inspection the silverware is almost always dirty. But Wertheimer often ate in these inns, at least once a day I want to see people, he said, even if it’s just this decrepit, down-and-out, filthy innkeeper. So I go from one cage to the next, Wertheimer once said, from the Kohlmarkt apartment to Traich and then back again, he said, I thought. From the catastrophic big-city cage into the catastrophic forest cage. Now I hide myself here, now there, now in the Kohlmarkt perversity, now in the country-forest perversity. I slip out of one and back into the other. For life. But this procedure has become such a habit that I can’t imagine doing anything else, he said. Glenn locked himself in his North American cage, I in my Upper Austrian one, Wertheimer said, I thought. He with his megalomania, I with my desperation. All three with our desperation, he said, I thought. I told Glenn about our hunting lodge, Wertheimer said, I’m convinced that that’s what gave him the idea of building his own house in the woods, his studio, his desperation machine, Wertheimer once said, I thought. What a stroke of lunacy, to build myself a house with a recording studio in the middle of the woods, cut off from all human contact, miles away from everything, only a lunatic does something like that for himself, a candidate for the mental ward, said Wertheimer. I didn’t have to build my desperation studio, I already had one in Traich. I inherited it from my father, who managed to stay here alone for years, was less delicate than I, less of a complainer, less pitiful, less absurd than I, Wertheimer once said. We have an ideal sister for our needs and she leaves us at exactly the wrong moment, completely unscrupulously, Wertheimer said. Goes off to Switzerland where everything’s going to pot, Switzerland is the most spineless country in Europe, he said, in Switzerland I’ve always had the feeling that I was in a whorehouse, he said. Everything whorish, the cities and the country, he said. St. Moritz, Saas Fee, Gstaad, all brothels, not to mention Zurich, Basel, world brothels, Wertheimer said on several occasions, world brothels, nothing but world brothels. This gloomy city Chur where the archbishop still says Good morning and Good night! he exploded. That’s where my sister runs off to, runs away from me, her cruel brother, the destroyer of her life and being! Wertheimer said, I thought. To Zizers, where the Catholic church stinks to high heaven! Glenn’s death has hit me very hard, I once heard him say clearly, while I stood in the restaurant, still in the same spot, I’d merely put my bag on the floor. Wertheimer had to commit suicide, I told myself, he had no future left. He’d used himself up, had run out of existence coupons. It’s completely like him to have slept with the innkeeper in her inn, I thought, I looked up at the ceiling in the restaurant, reflecting that the two of them had probably joined bodies right above the restaurant, in the innkeeper’s bed. The superaes-thete in that filthy bed, I thought. Mr. Refinement, who always claimed he could live only with Schopenhauer, Kant, Spinoza, sleeping with the innkeeper from Wankham at more or less regular intervals underneath her cheap feather bed. At first I had to laugh out loud, then it turned my stomach. No one had even heard my laughter. The innkeeper remained out of sight. As I watched the dining room got dirtier and dirtier, the whole inn more and more questionable. But I had no other choice,