I daresay it would surprise you to
know the books I was reading in this period of my life--and writing too:
for in my eleventh year I was the author of a one-volume history of the
world, besides several treatises. And I early began to think, too. What
was the fundamental principle underlying the evolution of a higher and
higher human type? How could this principle be unified through all
branches of science and reduced to an operable law? Questions such as
these kept me awake at night while I still wore short trousers. At
fourteen I was boarding alone in a kind of tenement on the East Side. Of
course I was quite different from all the people around me. Different. I
don't remember that they showed any affectionate interest in me, and why
on earth should they? As I say, I was different. There was nothing there
to suggest a conception of that brotherhood of man you speak of. I was
born with this impulse for isolation and work, and everything that
happened to me only emphasized it. I never had a day's schooling in my
life, and never a word of advice or admonition--never a scolding in all
my life till now.
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