My mind, like that of all other children, had been exercised by the
great problem of the mystery of our coming into the world. I was no
longer satisfied with the explanation that children were brought by the
stork, or with that other, advanced with greater seriousness, that they
drifted up in boxes, which were taken up out of Peblinge Lake. As a
child I tormented my mother with questions as to how you could tell
whom every box was for. That the boxes were numbered, did not make
things much clearer. That they were provided with addresses, sounded
very strange. Who had written the addresses? I then had to be content
with the assurance that it was a thing that I was too small to
understand; it should be explained to me when I was older.
My thoughts were not directed towards the other sex. I had no little
girl playfellows, and as I had no sister, knew very few. When I was
eight or nine years old, it is true, there was one rough and altogether
depraved boy whose talk touched upon the sexual question in expressions
that were coarse and in a spirit coarser still. I was scoffed at for
not knowing how animals propagated themselves, and that human beings
propagated themselves like animals.
I replied: "My parents, at any rate, never behaved in any such manner."
Then, with the effrontery of childhood, my schoolfellows went on to the
most shameless revelations, not only about a morbid development of
natural instincts, but actual crimes against nature and against the
elementary laws of society. In other words, I was shown the most
repulsive, most agitating picture of everything touching the relations
of the sexes and the propagation of the species.
It is probable that most boys in a big school have the great mystery of
Nature sullied for them in their tender years by coarseness and
depravity. Whereas, in ancient Greek times, the mystery was holy, and
with a pious mind men worshipped the Force of Nature without
exaggerated prudery and without shamelessness, such conditions are
impossible in a society where for a thousand years Nature herself has
been depreciated by Religion, associated with sin and the Devil,
stamped as unmentionable and in preference denied, in which, for that
very reason, brutality takes so much more terrible a satisfaction and
revenge. As grown-up people never spoke of the forces of Nature in a
pure and simple manner, it became to the children a concealed thing.
Individual children, in whom the sexual impulse had awakened early,
were taught its nature by bestial dispositions, and the knowledge was
interpreted by them with childish shamelessness. These children then
filled the ears of their comrades with filth.
In my case, the nastiness hit, and rebounded, without making any
impression. I was only infected by the tone of the other scholars in so
far as I learnt from them that it was manly to use certain ugly words.
When I was twelve years old, my mother surprised me one day, when I was
standing alone on the stairs, shouting these words out. I was reproved
for it, and did not do it again.