The Test of Courage: (A Biography of) Michel Thomas Read Online Free Page B

don’t need help yourself then you must give help to others - a principle that left a deep impression.’
    Both his mother and his aunt had brought him up to respect other religions, on the basis that they represented what was good about human beings and promoted high human values. He was taught to remove his hat in Christian churches and his shoes in mosques. But by the age of thirteen he was thoroughly sick at having to be so reverential, and rebelled. ‘There were so many things I had to respect that I wondered if they all deserved it. Did anything or any person automatically deserve respect? I had to find out for myself.’
    He began to question everything. All the rules, opinions and obligations that had been foisted upon him were subjected to a rigorous analysis. ‘I was working out a belief system, a personal philosophy. I seem to have had a very analytical mind as a child. It was an extension, I suppose, of the system I invented when I was six. I would pick a subject and question it, look at it, and try to go into it as deeply as I could. I had a complete system of analytical questioning set up. Questions. Questions. Questions. I particularly questioned my own Jewishness. I threw everything out - including God.
    ‘I would examine what I was supposed to believe and why. I had my own philosophical thoughts, and after I had pursued them as far as I could only then would I consult books and compare my ideas with other philosophers - Spinoza, Rant, Schopenhauer. I could always leave it off and pick it up, as if reading a book. And I could leave my thoughts and continue the next day, or months later, and know exactly where I left off. I might pick them up again waiting for a bus or a train. I was never bored.’
    He made a study of all the major religions, with particular emphasis on early Christianity, and came to the conclusion he was an agnostic. Later, he became both vexed and fascinated by the concept of infinity. ‘What was beyond the beyond? My answer was that humans were limited to the finite and could never know the answer to the question. I came to accept the concept of God and the divine - that which was beyond what we could know. So I stopped being an agnostic. But I decided that how we lived and what we did with our own lives was up to us. And rejected the law of retribution as absolute evil. The idea that a human being only did good acts because he was rewarded by God, or that one’s misfortunes were a punishment from God, I found contemptible. I felt we were responsible for our own acts, and that there was no divine reward or punishment, and that we had to live with the consequences of our behaviour. Especially the consequences of what we failed to do.’
    Despite his independence and maturity at fourteen, he still could not be left alone at night because of his sleep-walking. On one occasion when his aunt and uncle went on holiday, an eighteen-year-old girl, who was a friend of the family, was asked to stay. ‘The babysitter. And it happened: my first sexual experience. It was new and exciting but I did not think of it as love. She was too old, after all, and had a fiancé. I realise now she must have been very confused by it all and in great conflict. It went on for a while. I remember that after love-making I felt like rejecting her. And I didn’t like that feeling and didn’t understand it.’
    He crept into his uncle’s library, a comfortable, masculine room furnished with leather sofas and chairs, where the bookshelves went from the floor to the ceiling. His uncle used it as a Raucherzimmer - smoking room - to receive his male friends, and there were decanters full of liquor and a humidor for cigars on the sideboard. Michel had been allowed to borrow the beautifully bound books on mythology, but others, which he knew were about sex, were hidden away. He now sought these out and found a volume on sexual behaviour and psychology.
    Ideal Marriage , written in 1926 by a Dutch gynaecologist, Dr van