Seeing my fascination, my parents took us to look for fossils in the caves near where we lived. Once we found some bones and teeth, which turned out to be from ancient cave bears. What a thrill! We were discovering something that had been there for thousands of years and that nobody in modern times had seen before. After that, I became very interested in discovery.
The other important thing about my childhood was that our house had literally thousands of books of all kinds. There were books in all the rooms, in the corridors. I read many novels âDostoevsky; Tolstoy; all of Proust, which I must have read five times.