THE UNIVERSE OF INFORMATION.pdf - ideals

I work and battle for ideas, and they alone interest me. I conceive
these ideas clearly. I see them very highly reported and, from outside
contact, I am convinced they are not chimeras. My fellow country men
do not understand me. Is it that I haven't yet been able to exteriorise
them in a way suitable for their minds, or that my person is antipathetic
to them? ,1 experience natural regrets but cannot set about
anything else.
These regrets — they are to feel a force unused which one loves, and
to observe delay in the progress of one's ideas because of obstacles
where there should be help. Alas! This country has a natural aversion
to any idea which has in it some true grandeur. I do not urge them
for the possibility of money, honours ... But Belgium is not the world
and the Belgians do not constitute the whole of humanity ... It is
necessary to say this at a time when fatigue and wear and tear, bad
councillors, suggest that one should go and plant cabbages in some
corner ... 61
Otlet was now a middle-aged man personifying an order
shattered perhaps for ever by the War. His philosophy of
world peace was not popularly understood and the Centre
International was mocked in the newspapers. The invitation
that resulted in the Pan-African Congress being held at the
Palais Mondial in 1921 elicited considerable vituperative
criticism of «the solemn fools of the 'Palais Mondial'* who
were occupying valuable locations for storing cards. 62 After
the Quinzaine Internationale, Otlet was portrayed by one
commentator in his small, round, heavy glasses, with a stick
of chalk in his hands rapidly writing «chimerical figures» in
the air before him.
He speaks of cards, of pure sciences, of catalogs of statistics, and
above all of mondialism. This last vocable is sung quite softly in his
throat like a chant... as at the meetings of the first Christians. What
is mondialism? It is necessary to ask him, for no one else is cabale
of defining it unless it is his colleague and fried Henri La
Fontaine»
But this ironical commentator freely admitted «his disinterestedness
and nobleness of intention*. 63 The cards of the RBU
particularly captured the imagination and provoked the indignation
of his adversaries. Religion was not dead, a critic
said. It lived on in the new faith of the «documentatifs» whose
temple was the Palais Mondial. Worst of them all was M.
Otlet himself, for he had confounded the Palais Mondial with
himself: «M. Otlet, c'est le Palais Mondial, et le Palais
Mondial, c'est M. Otiet». 64 And in the new year, Otlet and
La Fontaine were the subjects of a sketch in a satiric review
in which they were shown as not content with the Palais du
Cinquantenaire but wanting «to transform the whole of
Brussels into a vast city of cards». 65
In the midst, too, of threatened aspirations, rejections,
vociferous and hostile critics, he suffered a dramatic resurgence
of trouble with his half-brothers and half-sister. In
1920 he had visited one brother, Raoul, in Spain to try to
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