THE UNIVERSE OF INFORMATION.pdf - ideals

Chapter
FROM UNIVERSAL KNOWLEDGE
TO SYNTHETIC BIBLIOGRAPHY
ANXIOUS DIRECTIONLESS, POSITIVISM
Marriage proved, at least at the beginning, a delight,
though it resolved none of Otlet's intellectual conflicts. Fernande
seems to have been a feckless, childlike woman, apparently
meek and demure, but wilful and not much interested
in his work. As he became busier in his daily affairs, Otlet
would sometimes note only a chance remark of hers in his
diary: «Darling, I am not developing. I will always be a little
nothing — nothing at all». Though she ran up enormous bills
at the haberdashers and her sojourns in Berlin with her family
seemed to him sometimes too long, she was anxious to please
him, and he tenderly anxious to protect her. «Darling, you
must love me, just as I am. I am naughty girl, aren't I? I make
you cry».
In the first few years of marriage he discovered that while he
still often lacked energy, the acute depressions of his youth
had gone. Yet now he was a prey to a frequent and nostalgic
sadness, disturbing in its unexpectedness and not easily to be
explained. His little Fenny, as he called her, had displaced
something deep inside him whose absence he found it in himself
to regret. She, on her part, was obscurely aware of this
and encouraged him to cultivate more earnestly his former
friends, to go out in the world more in order to combat these
vestiges of old feelings welling up so anachronistically in
him-—«look up your successful friends and think a little bit
about me, but don't be lonely». Perhaps this it to say only that
marriage, upon which he had set so much store, could not be,
given Fernande's character, the panacea for his long felt need
of congenial intellectual companionship, of some great task to
do in life.
Nor did the law prove satisfactory. At the bar he was
indeed at the intellectual and social hub of Brussels. One of
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