THE UNIVERSE OF INFORMATION.pdf - ideals

estate at Westend, also on the Belgian coast, as a holiday
resort. In the moments of despair to which he was susceptible
as a child and which quickened and deepened with adolescence,
he would contemplate travelling in remote countries of the
•world for several years before settling down, a romantic and
escapist phantasy perhaps, but also a quite realistic possibility.
In 1880 or 1881 Otlet's family bought for its pleasure part
of a Mediterranean island, the He du Levant, sold when its
fortunes declined, the island nowadays being given over to
a nudist colony. Long holidays were spent there. He looked
back upon these holidays when he was a young man with a
pleasant nostalgia, for, though there were lessons and frequent
drill in dancing and the piano and gymnastics, there were
also much fishing, hunting, horse-riding and agreeably solitary
study on rainy afternoons of the literature about the
island. The winter of 1882 seems to have been spent on the
island and on excursions in the family's yacht, Nora, to Nice
for the Carnival, and to Monaco. A charmed, indolent, slightly
unreal, and as it happened, impermanent existence, indeed. To it
we owe Otlet's first publication, a rather unpropitious piece
of juvenilia, lie du Levant 3 , which he anxiously saw through
the press. It was privately printed and distributed to the
members of the family, and he proudly anticipated a second
•edition when the first was expended.
His Jesuit education, allied with his own studious and
solitary temperament, was a powerful formative influence in
his life. It probably increased and certainly gave direction
to his tendency to introspection. To a contemporary eye he
seems to have had few moments of that gay unself-consciousness
one associates with childhood, though as a major source
of information about these years is his diary, we have
without doubt a picture in which the questing and despair are
over-emphasised. Yet it seems that from his earliest years
he was burdened with an almost morbid sensitivity to the
problem of finding a goal for his life and of following rules
of conduct proper to it and to his station. He had very early
to come to terms with an ascetic morality that forbade pleasure
and led him to reject and express guilt about innocent diversions.
From his earliest days at school in Paris he had been
placed under the rule of the Jesuits, and his diary bears
repetitive evidence of their influence, of dutiful examinations
of conscience, of the tutored recognition of the transience of
earthly things, of the pious practice of devotions. All of
these years of childhood and youth were instinct with a sense
of preparation which hung at times like a pall over him
because he could not decide where his vocation lay.
A child of his time, temperament and education, he turned
11