Well, science, although it's been the major part of my work, isn't the only thing I'm interested in. I think I did say earlier on I was interested in ancient history and ancient cultures. I mentioned Egyptology. I think the Egyptology had an attraction because it has puzzles in it, deciphering languages and things of that sort, so I guess part of my interest in science is because it does present puzzles and problems to solve. But at least they are problems of great importance, or one hopes of importance, or would lead to important things, although that wasn't the original reason. It was all just pure curiosity.
But I have always been interested in literature. I read a lot as a young man. Durban had a good library, and I... of course, we didn't have all that many books at home. I read... I read, of course, all of the adventure stories and so on, but all along I did read what you might call relatively serious books. When I was at school I read quite a lot of the work, A Dominie's Log and so on, about AS Neill who was the man who started experimental schools and I was quite impressed by that, and we had a small group who thought how different it was from our relatively regime at Durban Boys High School which was run on absolutely fixed lines, but this was a sort of youthful protest. I began reading... I read relatively serious literature. I read a couple of Dickens, George Eliot, because there wasn't a great deal to do in Durban. You did go to the bush, there was the bush, and the beach which I mentioned, but it wasn't a... there wasn't a lot of distraction. I didn't play any sport other than that I did at school, although I played in the afternoons. We played cricket in the local park. But I didn't have any hobbies really, other than making model aeroplanes out of wood and greaseproof paper. So I read a lot, and I read a lot of history mostly, and in more recent years it's mostly been ancient history. I read the classics, translation of Dostoevsky, Turgenev, say, the great Russian classics, and I've read the Germans, I read Thomas Mann, and when I learnt some Germany I read a bit of German poems, Goethe, and Rilke and people like that. I couldn't ever do anything with Holderlin, that was too romantic or too advanced for me, but I was pretty influenced by reading Prometheus by Goethe, Hier sitz ich, forme Menschen, Nach meinem Bilde, you know it at all?
[Q] No.
Oh, you ought to read it. It's one of... the most humanistic poem ever. It's about reaction to the Gotter – Götter, you know, with the gods, and... he likens them to a boy, a random boy, Der Disteln köpft, who knocks off the heads of the thistles, you see. This is... we are at the mercy of these gods who influence our lives and this is a protest by Goethe that this is not so, you see. And this is man exerting himself, it's humanist. Because Prometheus, if you remember, stole fire from the gods and was punished for it. So I could read a bit of that. I couldn't read... I really... I really lacked, because I lacked French and real German. I couldn't really read the European classics in their own language, but I did read in translation. And when I... I read a good deal of ancient history, right throughout.
