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he had always had the will to achieve this height of concentration, in every aspect of his being, he had this will to concentration, the will to reach the absolute limit which was his most salient characteristic, he had given up practically everything he had ever been in order to achieve what he had not been and what he ultimately became by dint of superhuman excessive effort.
    We rarely meet a man like Roithamer, I must admit, and probably never again in our lifetime, a man who, having recognized his capacity for it, does all he can to achieve the record performance of his being and who, once he has embarked on his scientific discipline, intensifies this discipline every day and every moment until he brings it to the utmost point of concentration within himself and must go on concentrating it to the utmost possible intensity, having suddenly no longer any alternative to perfecting his possibilities, anything else has become impossible for him, he must keep his eye fixed undeviatingly on his highest possibilities, unable to see anything apart from these, where such an extraordinary talent for life and therefore for science as Roithamer’s is involved, such an enduring and lifelong concentration means an enduring and lifelong incarceration within that extraordinary talent for life and for science, because from a certain moment onward, such a man can no longer live for anything other than his genius for reaching his aim which, once he has clearly perceived it, suddenly outweighs everything else and becomes his only motive, all at once such a man’s entire being is concentrated in his resistance to everything that might stand in the way or even merely distract him from the gradual achievement and ultimate fulfillment of his aim; resisting everything, concerning himself with nothing except whatever will advance his aim, such a man goes his increasingly lonely and painful way, a way such a man must invariably go alone and without help from anyone, as Roithamer realized quite early in life, suddenly he had left behind everything, especially everything to do with Altensam and its surroundings, consequently all his relatives, physical and spiritual, in whom he had suddenly recognized the greatest impediment to his aim, he had given up what the others, siblings and other relatives, either were not ready to give up or incapable of giving up, the habit of the habit of Altensam, the habit of the Austrian habit-mechanism, the habit of the familiar, of all one is born to, he gave it all up, everything the others did not give up, all he had to do was to think of giving up, leaving behind, everything the others did not give up and leave behind, all he had to do was to observe what the others did or did not do in order to do it or not do it himself, their omissions were his activities, his activities were their omissions, a simple trick in which he had been able to achieve great facility from earliest childhood, by constantly observing everything around him, by a persistent testing and receiving and rejecting of everything other than himself, his character, his mind, because he had always been different from everything else and everybody else and so, by his constant observation of everything else and everyone else he had arrived at an even higher degree of lucidity, he could see that he had to take a different direction from all the others, travel a different road, lead a different life, a different existence from theirs and all others, as a result of which, in fact, quite different possibilities had opened up for him from those of the others and from those otherwise constituted, under whose dominance he had come with time, more and more, in a very special quite idiosyncratic innate rhythm of his own in which he had schooled himself, Roithamer had understood early in life what the others had not understood until much later or had never understood at all, the most salient feature of his relationship to the others is always their total failure