THE UNIVERSE OF INFORMATION.pdf - ideals

in a diary he kept systematically from his 11th to his 27th
year. This diary provides us with an invaluably detailed
•account of his intellectual and emotional development. 2
It appears that though Otlet's childhood was in some
ways oppressive it was also rather charmed. His only notable
•companion until he went to the College Saint Michel in
Brussels when he was 14, was his brother Maurice. The two
brothers amused each other with such precocious pursuits as
drawing up in elaborate and formal detail the statutes of a
Limited Company for Useful Knowledge. This was early
experience for a task at which later practice was to make
Otlet particularly adept. It was from lack of friends in his
childhood that Otlet turned, he believed, to a diary in order
to relieve the burden of impressions and feelings which,
otherwise unexpressed, threatened to grow too violent within
him. Indeed, the prolonged isolation of his childhood led him
to develop early in life a taste for solitude, for study, which
he felt as he grew up interfered with his ability to make the
friends in the stead of which the diary had originally stood,
though, as he breasted the wave of adolescence, the need for
friendship grew more and more strong.
Despite his sense of isolation, he received a good though
somewhat intermittent formal education. He went first at the
age of eleven to a Jesuit school in Paris, whither the dissolution
of a business association leading to a sudden but temporary
decline in his father's fortune, had sent the family. Here,
precocious intellectually, inexperienced and out of sympathy
•with others of his own age, he developed habits of piety and
hard work which, when he transferred to a Brussels day
school three years later, made him easy bait for the mockery
of his more irreverent, less studious companions. After three
months of this school, whose professors he described rather
priggishly, for he was no more than 14 years old at the time,
as «lazy» and only «more or less Catholic», he was sent as
a demi-pensionnaire to the prominent Jesuit College Saint
Michel. He was as happy there as could be expected of a
youth so introverted, so afflicted by a sense of isolation, so
prone to despondency. He graduated from the school in the
middle of a thunderstorm in August 1886 after a not undistinguished
but by no means brilliant career.
The charm of his childhood, at least for those approaching
it through the sometimes laconic entries of his diary, lay in
its relative freedom, its carefree though structured existence
and in the travels on which he was so often swept away. At
eleven he had travelled widely in Italy and France. Later, at
the Colege Saint Michel, he accompanied his parents on
several business trips to Russia for quite extensive periods.
The family spent much time at Ostend and exploited real
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