knowledge of politics and everything connected with politics as he had, the result of regular observations made, again and again I saw with what thoroughness he had kept himself briefed on the latest political events and was prepared to bring into the discussion at any moment such current political events, many of them not those everyone was talking about but those operating under the surface of the world political scene continually and decisively to determine the political realities and to relate them to his own current interests even if these happened to be at the furthest possible remove from the political events, he was always making remarks which gave evidence that he let nothing escape him which brought life or, on the contrary, stagnation into the political world, he was, as an intelligent man of course must be, a daily attentive and critical reader of every newspaper and periodical within reach and in every possible way kept himself informed about the political scene which, as he said, held the greatest fascination for him, once he even said that the art of politics was the highest-ranking of all the arts, a remark indicating that he regarded politics not as a science but an art, were he not, he said, who he was, he would have devoted himself always and with the greatest possible energy to the political art, but he did after all regard natural science and the study of its foundations as the primary task of his life, which is why he had not taken up politics or rather, as he always expressly phrased it, the political art, as I now can see, he was always most excited by politics, especially the always monstrous, even if in so-called peaceful periods quiet politics, he was always excited about the actually always world-shaking and world-changing and consequently world-destroying political events and was generally in a chronic state of excitement about the political factor as such, perhaps to an even greater degree than one might expect of him, occupied as he was with his own scientific work, in natural science; because he was a man who was interested in everything, politics was bound to interest him more than anything, even though his actual intellectual life was entirely concentrated on natural science and on nature, natural science as my actual science , as he once said, he was always at a peak of excitement and readiness-to-explain resulting from his observations of primarily all the political events in the world, observations that sustain me, as he said, in my isolation which enables me to get on with my scientific work. And so it is self-evident that he would be tempted to elucidate his subject when he spoke about it and while he spoke about it, in clear language, in short sentences, using all his skill of phrasing while constantly intent upon simultaneously elucidating and reexamining his theme, always while conquering and reconquering his primary subject matter, natural science, during every moment of his preoccupation with this subject matter, since to think is to regain and recover, moment by moment, everything previously thought, to make it new, and so it is self-evident that he always had to consider politics, always specifically the actual political events of the time together with their political history and at least relate all that to his own thinking, since the thinker must think not only his own special discipline but everything else which is, after all, logically related to his own subject, as conversely everything else is related to his own subject, that is, all his own possibilities or impossibilities and probabilities and im probabilities are always interrelated with all the others. And so it is not at all strange that I have found many notes of a political nature in Hoeller’s garret, I had noticed immediately that many of the notes tacked or pasted on the wall were political notes, just as he had loved covering the walls of his rooms in England, also, with political notes primarily, he felt in his
Similar Books
