CALLINGS
Two stories of children: the first of a significant English philosopher, R. G. Collingwood (1889–1943); the second of a brilliant Spanish bullfighter, Manolete (1917–1947). The first shows how the daimon breaks suddenly into a young life; the second exhibits the disguises and tortuous concealments the daimon sometimes uses:
My father had plenty of books, and … one day when I was eight years old curiosity moved me to take down a little black book lettered on its spine “Kant’s Theory of Ethics.” … as I began reading it, my small form wedged between the bookcase and the table, I was attacked by a strange succession of emotions. First came an intense excitement. I felt that things of the highest importance were being said about matters of the utmost urgency: things which at all costs I must understand. Then, with a wave of indignation, came the discovery that I could not understand them. Disgraceful to confess, here was a book whose words were English and whose sentences were grammatical, but whose meaning baffled me. Then, third and last, came the strangest emotion of all. I felt that the contents of this book, although I could not understand it, were somehow my business: a matter personal to myself, or rather to some future self of my own.… there was no desire in it; I did not, in any natural sense of the word, “want” to master the Kantian ethics when I should be old enough; but I felt as if a veil had been lifted and my destiny revealed.
There came upon me by degrees, after this, a sense of being burdened with a task whose nature I could not define except by saying, “I must think.” What I was to think about I did not know; and when, obeying this command, I fell silent and absent-minded.6
The philosopher who thought out major works in metaphysics, aesthetics, religion, and history was already called and beginning to practice “philosophizing” as an eight-year-old. His father provided the books and access to them, but the daimon chose that father, and its “curiosity” reached for that book.
As a child, Manolete did not seem in any way to be a prospective bullfighter. The man who changed old styles and renewed the ideals of the corrida was a timid and fearful boy.