Learning and Suffering in Vienna
draw far into the night; it never tired me. And so my faith was strengthened that my lovely dream of the future would become reality after all, even though it took years. I was firmly convinced that I would make a name as an architect.
The fact that I also took the greatest interest in anything having to do with politics did not seem to me significant. On the contrary, I regarded that as the commonplace duty of all thinking people. Anyone who did not feel that way simply lost all right to criticize or complain.
Here too, then, I read and learned much.
It is true that by “reading” I may mean something different from what the average member of our intelligentsia means.
I know people who “read” enormously, book after book, word for word, and yet whom I would not call well-read. They do have an enormous mass of “knowledge,” but their brain does not succeed in dividing up and cataloguing the material they have acquired. They lack the art of dividing the book into parts valuable and worthless for them, and of keeping the one part in their heads forever, but of not seeing the other part at all, or at any rate not lugging it along as useless ballast.
Reading, after all, is not an end in itself, but a means. In the first place it should help to fill out the framework which inclination and ability give to each individual. Then it may furnish the tools and material which a man needs in his occupation, no matter whether of simple physical providing or of fulfilling a high destiny. In the second place it should give a man a general picture of the world.
But in either case what is read must not simply be stored in the memory in the order of the book or series of books read; the facts, like bits of a mosaic, must have each its proper place in the general image of the world, thus helping to shape this image in the reader’s head. Otherwise there will be a mad confusion of stuff learned, whose worthlessness vies with its effect in making the unhappy possessor conceited. He, of course, seriously believes he is “cultivated,” that he has some understanding of life, possesses some knowledge; whereas in fact each new bit of “cul-
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