jumped the rope, or make a great racket.

For two or three years I had not spoken of a religious vocation, for
I now understood that such a desire was a thing of the past, was
impossible; but I had not found anything to put in its place. When
strangers asked what career I was being prepared for, my parents, a
little anxious in regard to my future, did not know what to say; and I
knew still less what to reply.

However my brother, who was also much concerned over my enigmatical
future, in one of those letters that seemed always to come from an
enchanted land, suggested, because of a certain facility in mathematics
and a certain precision of nature, certainly anomalies in one of my
temperament, that it might be well for me to study engineering. And
when they consulted me and I replied apathetically: "Very well, it is
agreeable enough to me," the matter seemed satisfactorily settled.

I would need to spend a little more than a year at a polytechnic school
in order to prepare myself. To be there or elsewhere, what difference
did it make to me? . . . When I contemplated the men of a certain age
who surrounded me, those occupying the most honorable positions, who
had every claim to respect and consideration, I would say to myself:
"It will some day be necessary for me to live a useful, sedate life in
a given place and fixed sphere as they do, and to grow old as they
are--and that is all!" And a bitter hopelessness overwhelmed me as I
brooded on the thought; I yearned for the impossible; I longed most of
all to remain a child forever, and the reflection that the years were
fleeing, and that, whether I would or would not, I must become a man,
was anguish to me.