Between Walter and myself only a semiconscious state continued to prevail, in that semiconscious state we existed side by side as though in and as though against the misapplied reason of our acquiescence: henceforth we only obeyed … Our mutual relationship was not without enmity … indeed our natural innate mutual aversion was in truth the source of our affection, of our sibling commitment, our petrifaction …  We lived at the highest degree of difficulty at which two human beings who are painfully joined can bear to exist … on many days we were as soothing to each other as humanly possible … which drained us as time went on … the high art of coming to each other’s aid was something we had mastered early on in peerless fashion, and we had been able to develop it further still after the catastrophe … In the tower we had suddenly become fully conscious of the deepest darkness, at moment … of the inanity of possibilities … in the tower we had become conscious of ourselves, it was then that we looked at ourselves, for the first time, from the outside and from the inside … Rhythmically, for a celebration however agonizing, we joined, after the deaths of our parents, in constant fear of ourselves, of our own divinations … the time we spent together was a time without closed season … we kept on living through it without joy and, as if we ourselves had been our own power of observation, apathetically … Subject only to physics, not harmony ourselves, we were our own misfortune …  In Walter this process reached even deeper … We stood in manifold contrast to each other, for instance: while I was occupied with my science, Walter was ruled, undercooled, overheated by his music … for Walter everything sprang out of himself, but for me not the least little bit sprang out of me … That alone would be sufficient reason for the disquisition “About Us” … But even after that disquisition, what we were, are, will be will remain in darkness, everything remains forever in darkness … everything is always, is not … our simultaneity, temperaments, geometry … from the bottom up, in order to be higher at the bottom … We lived consistently, often insistently, if truth be told, in mutual physical aversion … the physical element in Walter, his eccentric physical side, has been the eccentric physical side our mother, alien to me … My physical side that of our father … all our lives we mediated between the two of us … As a result of Walter’s illness our aversion (for each other) had become affection (against each other) …