ABSTRACT
When I think about myself in relation to what I have come to know, several episodes in my life seem to stand out as particularly important. One of these goes back to quite early childhood. Between the age of 7 and 10, I was not able to master the telephone. I couldn’t tell which end was which, and so it was always a matter of chance which end I put to my mouth and which to my ear. As I had to use the telephone at home about once a week to arrange a lesson with a local violin-teacher, I regularly experienced the shame of my very visible incompetence being witnessed by the five other children in my family, whose scorn, disbelief or kindly rescue were the usual sequel to my attempts at telephoning. In those days, the earpiece and mouthpiece of telephones were more clearly differentiated than they are nowadays. There was certainly nothing wrong with my eyesight; I was good at jigsaw puzzles, and I had a collection of very small china animals whose tiny details I often dwelt on. And there must have been very many times when my aunt, with patience and love, tried to help me connect the different shapes of the receiver with where I should put them – as well as the frequent, often exasperated instructions of the other children. Yet, despite my adequate perceptual equipment and the teaching I received, I could not, over several years, acquire this piece of learning. (I stopped having violin lessons at 10, so this particular skill ceased to be needed then.)
