Correction: A Novel by Thomas Bernhard Page B

element in this on the one hand scientific, on the other hand decidedly political, interest in the inconspicuous as well as the conspicuous relationship of his thought and his intellectual labors and always, when he spoke of science, he was also speaking of politics and everything else, and when he spoke of politics he was also speaking of science and everything else, because the scientist, or the man we regard as a scientist, or the so-called scientist, who has given himself up to a science because he had to give himself up to a science, has to think not only about his own scientific subject, if he is to be taken seriously as a scientist, but must continually think about all the other fields as well, and then again in the light of all the other fields about his own field and the other way around, and his entire existence is nothing but such incessant testing in which he, the scientist, must incessantly examine what he is thinking at the moment, which should be everything, because unless one is thinking of everything at each moment one is not thinking at all, according to him. Everything that is thought, all thought resulting in action, he said, is political, and we are involved in a totally political world and a totally political society which keeps this world in constant motion. The truth is that a human being is a political creature in every fiber of his being, do what he will, think what he will, deny it if he will, whenever he will. There were also indications of his love for the arts, music most of all, second only to politics as the art to which he was most receptive, as he said, and which he had eventually made his favorite art, indications of which I instantly noticed in Hoeller’s garret, the many notebooks, excerpts of piano scores, et cetera, also musical notations written in his own hand, musical motifs which he, who had perfect pitch, expected to be helpful to him in advancing his scientific work because, as he always used to say, music is the art closest to natural science and the nature of man; music, he said, was basically mathematics made audible, a fact enough in itself to make music indispensable to the scientist as an instrument toward all his objectives and discoveries and the achievement of ever-new knowledge and discoveries, which is why he, Roithamer, concerned himself, in addition to his specialty and natural science in general and all the related disciplines, above all with music as the art medium most useful to him, and I know that he often left Cambridge to spend several days in London in order to hear a particular composition by Purcell or Handel, because he regarded hearing such music as absolutely indispensable to making progress in his own field, what I think about and what I am working on I could never think about and work on without music, as he said, it is always music which enables me to take the next step in my scientific growth, by listening to Purcell or by listening to Handel, as he said, it becomes possible for me to progress more quickly than if I were not listening to Purcell or to Handel, he loved Handel and Purcell more than any other composer, he esteemed these two above Bach, and next to them it was Mozart and, probably because of his Austrian origins, Bruckner, for whom he felt special preference, on one occasion when we were joined by a third man, a musicologist from Oxford, I suddenly had the confirmation that Roithamer’s knowledge of music, which must unhesitatingly be termed a scholarly knowledge of music, was indeed knowledge on the highest level, I still remember the Oxford musicologist’s recurrent outcries of amazement—he had been booted out of Vienna by the Nazis just before the war broke out, a man whose intellectual incorruptibility (an expression of Roithamer’s) instantly convinced me of his superior competence, the most distinguished musicologist in all England at the time—
    his amazement every time Roithamer made a remark on musical scholarship and art,