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not know what to do with it, for when they were idle there was actually nothing going on, as they were incapable of thinking, let alone of engaging in a rigorous mental process. For the thinking person there is no such thing as idleness. My parents’ idleness was of course genuine idleness, for when they did nothing there was nothing going on in them. By contrast, one might say, the thinking person is at his most active when he is supposedly doing nothing. This is beyond the comprehension of genuinely idle people like my parents and my family in general. Yet on the other hand, my parents did have an inkling of the nature of Uncle Georg’s idleness, and this was why they hated him, for they guessed that his idleness, being quite differentfrom theirs, not only could become dangerous, but always was dangerous. The thinking person who is idle appears as the greatest threat to those for whom idleness means simply doing nothing, who actually do nothing when they are idle. They hate him because, in the nature of things, they cannot despise him. At the age of four Uncle Georg is said to have taken himself off to Haag, a village about five miles away, where he told total strangers that he came from Wolfsegg and did not intend going back. The villagers, understandably at a loss to know what to make of this strange child, brought little Georg back, kicking and screaming, to his parents. Most of the time his parents, and others who were put in charge of him, more or less had to chain him to Wolfsegg like a little dog to stop him from running away. He told me that as a very small child he had resolved to stay at Wolfsegg no longer than was absolutely necessary. But naturally I waited for the moment when I could free myself from Wolfsegg without hardship, he once told me in Cannes, that is to say until I had all the means that were necessary for total freedom. Of course, Wolfsegg itself is a wonderful place, he said, but the family has always soured it for me. Your father, he once said, is a weak character. He’s actually a kind man, but insufferable. And your mother’s a greedy woman who married him only for venal motives. Of course, she was a nobody. She’s said to have been pretty, but there’s no sign of that now. Your father isn’t basically a greedy man. It was your mother who aroused a kind of primitive greed in him. But even before he met your mother I didn’t get along with him. We were complete opposites. Sure, he’s good-natured, he still is, but please don’t be angry when I say he’s a stupid person. Your mother has him completely under her thumb. Yet at school he was better than I was. Everything he did was excellent. He handed in the best work. He was popular, and I wasn’t. He always got better grades than I did. But although we were dressed alike, I always looked smarter than he did. I don’t know why. But I only say this, said Uncle Georg, because basically I’ve always loved your father, who after all is my brother. And the last time he was in Rome Uncle Georg actually told me more than once that he still loved his brother more than anyone else in the world. If only that woman, your mother, hadn’t appeared on the scene! A woman turns up and marries a man, against his will, and then proceeds to drive out his good qualities, his good character,and destroy him, or at least to turn him into a puppet on a string. Your mother made your father her puppet. My God, Uncle Georg exclaimed, how your father could have developed if he’d found himself a different wife! I know no woman more uncultured than your mother, he said. She goes to the opera but doesn’t understand the least thing about music. She looks at a picture but understands nothing about painting. She pretends she reads books but she doesn’t read any. Yet at mealtimes she prattles away nonstop and talks down all around her with her arrant nonsense. All the same she ought to know how money can be made to multiply by itself, not in the perverse, idiotic