My mother had the unpleasant habit of calling after me all sorts of good advice when I was setting out for some place to which I had been invited. On these occasions I not only wore my best clothes and polished shoes, but felt the dignity of my purpose and of my appearance in public, so that it was a humiliation for me to have people on the street hear all the ignominious things my mother called out after me, “And don’t forget to give them regards from Papa and Mama, and wipe your nose — do you have a handkerchief? Have you washed your hands?” And so on. It struck me as definitely unfair that the inferiority feelings which accompanied my self-importance should thus be exposed to the world when I had taken every care, out of amour-propre and vanity, to present as irreproachable an appearance as possible. For these occasions meant a very great deal to me. On the way to the house to which I was invited I felt important and dignified, as I always did when I wore my Sunday clothes on a week-day. The picture changed radically, however, as soon as I came in sight of the house I was visiting. Then a sense of the grandeur and power of those people overcame me. I was afraid of them, and in my smallness wished I might sink fathoms deep into the ground. That was how I felt when I rang the bell. The tinkling sound from inside rang like the toll of doom in my ears. I felt as timid and craven as a stray dog. It was ever so much worse when my mother had prepared me properly beforehand. Then the bell would ring in my ears: “My shoes are filthy, and so are my hands; I have no handkerchief and my neck is black with dirt.” Out of defiance I would then not convey my parents’ regards, or I would act with unnecessary shyness and stubbornness. If things became too bad I would think of my secret treasure in the attic, and that helped me regain my poise. For in my forlorn state I remembered that I was also the “Other,” the person who possessed that inviolable secret, the black stone and the little man in frock coat and top hat.
I cannot recall in my boyhood ever having thought of the possibility of a connection between Lord Jesus — or the Jesuit in the black robe — the men in frock coats and top hats standing by the grave, the gravelike hole in the meadow, the underground temple of the phallus, and my little man in the pencil-case. The dream of the ithyphallic god was my first great secret; the manikin was the second. It does seem to me, however, that I had a vague sense of relationship between the ‘soul-stone’ and the stone which was also myself.
To this day, writing down my memories at the age of eighty-three, I have never fully unwound the tangle of my earliest memories. They are like individual shoots of a single underground rhizome, like stations on a road of unconscious development. While it became increasingly impossible for me to adopt a positive attitude to Lord Jesus, I remember that from the time I was eleven the idea of God began to interest me. I took to praying to God, and this somehow satisfied me because it was a prayer without contradictions. God was not complicated by my distrust. Moreover, he was not a person in a black robe, and not Lord Jesus of the pictures, draped with brightly coloured clothes, with whom people behaved so familiarly. Rather he was a unique being of whom, so I heard, it was impossible to form any correct conception. He was, to be sure, something like a very powerful old man. But to my great satisfaction there was a commandment to the effect that “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image or any likeness of any thing.” Therefore one could not deal with him as familiarly as with Lord Jesus, who was no “secret.” A certain analogy with my secret in the attic began to dawn on me.
School came to bore me. It took up far too much time which I would rather have spent drawing battles and playing with fire. Divinity classes were unspeakably dull, and I felt a downright fear of the mathematics class. The teacher pretended that algebra was a perfectly natural affair, to be taken for granted, whereas I didn’t even know what numbers really were. They were not flowers, not animals, not fossils; they were nothing that could be imagined, mere quantities that resulted from counting. To my confusion these quantities were now represented by letters, which signified sounds, so that it became possible to hear them, so to speak. Oddly enough, my classmates could handle these things and found them self-evident. No one could tell me what numbers were, and I was unable even to formulate the question. To my horror I found that no one understood my difficulty. The teacher, I must admit, went to great lengths to explain to me the purpose of this curious operation of translating understandable quantities into sounds. I finally grasped that what was aimed at was a kind of system of abbreviation, with the help of which many quantities could be put in a short formula. But this did not interest me in the least. I thought the whole business was entirely arbitrary. Why should numbers be expressed by sounds? One might just as well express a by apple tree, b by box, and x by a question mark. a, b, c, x, y, z were not concrete and did not explain to me anything about the essence of numbers, any more than an apple tree did. But the things that exasperated me most of all was the proposition: If a = b and b = c, then a = c, even though by definition a meant something other than b, and, being different, could therefore not be equated with b, let alone with c. Whenever it was a question of an equivalence, then it was said a = a, b = b, and so on. This I could accept, wheras a = b seemed to me a downright lie or a fraud. I was equally outraged when the teacher stated in the teeth of his own definition of parallel lines that they met at infinity. This seemed to me no better than a stupid trick to catch peasants with, and I could not and would not have anything to do with it. My intellectual morality fought against these whimsical inconsistencies, which have forever debarred me from understanding mathematics. Right into old age I have had the incorrigible feeling that if, like my schoolmates, I could have accepted without a struggle the proposition that a = b, or that sun = moon, dog = cat, then mathematics might have fooled me endlessly — just how much I only began to realise at the age of eighty-four. All my life it remained a puzzle to me why it was that I never managed to get my bearings in mathematics when there was no doubt whatever that I could calculate properly. Least of all did I understand my own moral doubts concerning mathematics.
Equations I could comprehend only by inserting specific numerical values in place of the letters and verifying the meaning of the operation by actual calculation. As we went on in mathematics I was able to get along, more or less, by copying out algebraic formulas whose meaning I did not understand, and by memorising where a particular combination of letters had stood on the blackboard. I could no longer make headway by substituting numbers, for from time to time the teacher would say, “Here we put the expression so-and-so,” and then he would scribble a few letters on the blackboard. I had no idea where he got them and why he did it — the only reason I could see was that it enabled him to bring the procedure to what he felt was a satisfactory conclusion. I was so intimidated by my incomprehension that I did not dare to ask any questions.
Mathematics classes became sheer terror and torture to me. Other subjects I found easy; and as, thanks to my good visual memory, I contrived for a long while to swindle my way through mathematics, I usually had good marks. But my fear of failure and my sense of smallness in face of the vast world around me created in me not only a dislike but a kind of silent despair which completely ruined school for me. In addition, I was exempted from drawing-classes on grounds of utter incapacity. This in a way was welcome to me, since it gave me more free time; but on the other hand it was a fresh defeat, since I had some facility in drawing, although I did not realise it depended essentially on the way I was feeling. I could draw only what stirred my imagination. But I was forced to copy prints of Greek gods with sightless eyes, and when that wouldn’t go properly the teacher obviously thought I needed something more naturalistic and set before me the picture of a goat’s head. This assignment I failed completely, and that was the end of my drawing-classes.
To my defeats in mathematics and drawing there was now added a third: from the very first I hated gymnastics. I could not endure having others tell me how to move. I was going to school in order to learn something, not to practise useless and senseless acrobatics. Moreover, as a result of my earlier accidents, I had a certain physical timidity which I was not able to overcome until much later on. This timidity was in turn linked with a distrust of the world and its potentialities. To be sure, the world seemed to me beautiful and desirable,