From an Early Age

I took the business of educating myself with uncompromising seriousness.  From the beginning, I plunged into history and the sciences, consciously anchoring myself in temporal and material reality.  By the time I was nine years old I knew the names of the planets and had some idea of the scale of the solar system, as well as how long it had been since the Golden Age of Greece and Rome.  When a Fairy Godfather, in the shape of my father's cousin Harold, summoned my father and me, aged ten, to the Ancestral Seat outside Moscow, Idaho and bestowed upon me, with thrilling solemnity, the entire set of The Book of Knowledge (virtually a child's Encyclopaedia Britannica), I fully appreciated, and was grateful for, Cousin Harold's almost supernaturally percipient recognition of my genius and my vocation--and maybe for the first time also I saw myself-entire, and knew, "as though the chart were given," the purpose of my existence.   It goes almost without saying that the Book of Knowledge became my meat and drink, what I took to bed with me, and what I got up with in the morning; winter and summer, indoors and outdoors, day and night, for the next two and a half years, I had always a volume of the Book of Knowledge with me--reading, and re-reading.  It was from it that I knew the history of Italian art, music and architecture which made me and my Italian uncle, for a while, social equals and allies.   It was the Book of Knowledge, really, that made it possible for me to "coast" through the subsequent fifty years of my formal education, absolutely secure in the knowledge of what things are, what they're made of, and, even more importantly, when things are, and what character they have.