Читать книгу All in the Day's Work: An Autobiography онлайн

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A few months later I passed into high school; and when at the end of the year the grades were averaged at a ceremony where everybody was present I stood at the head of the honor roll. Nobody could have been more surprised. I had not been working for the honor roll: I had simply been doing what they expected me to do as I understood it, and here I was at the top. I remember I felt very serious about it. Having made the top once, I knew what would be expected of me. I couldn’t let my father and mother or my teachers down, so I continued to learn my lessons. It was a good deal like being good at a game. I liked to work out the mathematics and translations—good puzzles, but that they had any relation to my life I was unconscious. And then suddenly, among these puzzles I was set to solve, I found in certain textbooks the sesame which was to free my curiosity, stir desires to know, set me working on my own to find out more than these books had to offer. The texts which did all this for me were a series I suspect a modern teacher might laugh at—Steele’s Fourteen Weeks in Zoology, Geology, Botany, Natural Philosophy, Chemistry.