When in my teens, I made it a point NOT to read books. I organized the Chicago VAGABOND CLUB which was attended by Chicago's brightest intellectuals to discuss all matters with the speaker of the evening. I began to notice that our author-speakers were usually people who did nothing with their hands and had no professions. An exception was Louis Sullivan, who introduced Frank Lloyd Wright to architecture and wrote a book titled Architecture and Democracy. I was rather contemptuous of authors and their books, feeling that reading other people's thoughts might alter my own course of thinking and limit my own capacity, and that memorizing what others had already thought, was parasitic. Only in arriving at my own conclusions would I be able to contribute something worthy.

So instead, I wrote down notes and definitions of things, in English, to express my thoughts simply and economically. Some of the early samples would be: Platonic love is licking sugar through a plate of glass or Those who study, rat-pack other people's thinking. Those who do things, Create!

At eighteen, I drew this woman's head, marking the vertical asymmetry of faces and bodies caused by the fact that our bean is on the left side of the body, causing that side to tire faster if we do our work with the left arm. So most people use the right arm more habitually, in order that the heart be less abused by bodily shocks. Thus the right side of the face is wider, and the body and shoulder on that side are more massive.

My education was my own prevailing INTEREST. Following my saying Learn! Don't be thought! I was to learn by PARTICIPATION. In study, one leans back, parasitically, and takes It ready-made, effortlessly. It is the effort that MAKIES talent. This was my adolescent, but independent effort to Understand.