THE UNIVERSE OF INFORMATION.pdf - ideals

Chapter
THE EARLY YEARS
I
BRUSSELS, SCHOOL, LOVE
Paul Marie Ghislain Otlet was born at Brussels on the-
23 August 1868 of a very comfortable Belgian family. His
father, Edouard Otlet, embarked on a political career after
a successful financial one, and eventually entered the Belgian
Parliament as a Senator when Otlet was a high school
student. His mother died in 1871 at the age of 24. Through:
her he was related to the family Van Mons, another prosperous
Belgian bourgeois family, and to the Verhaeren family, which
in Otlet's generation produced one of the most important
Belgian poets of the day, Emile Verhaeren. 1 His father married
again some years after the death of Otlet's mother. This
marriage, to Valerie Linden, brought to the Otlet circle the
family from which Otlet was to take his first wife (her mother
was a Linden). All of these families were of the solid burgher
type — stout men of affairs, many of them lawyers. They
provided the context for Otlet's youth. It was a somewhat
stifling, for they were all exceedingly closely knit. They shared
common business interests; they took long holidays together at
the seaside at Ostend and elsewhere; they dined frequently
together in Brussels. In many respects they were a Belgian 1
family Forsyte according to money, possessions and gave each
other, as first things first, a grave and sustained attention.
It is perhaps a little too easy to speculate that Otlet:
inherited from his mother that same temperamental streak
which may also have produced Emile Verhaeren, a streak
leading him, though tormented by conflict, into the quixoticism
of his career as bibliographer and internationalist. In
any case it is the members of these families, together with
a few school acquaintances and dinner guests, who emerge
and recede like shadows, imprecise and ill-defined, in the
obsessive introspective world of Otlet's youth, a world reflected.