SAT exerpt: socialization and European schooling

novel excerpt from a book by Gregor von Rezzori

"Skushno is a Russian word that is difficult to translate. It means more than dreary boredom; a spiritual void that sucks you in like a bague but intensely urgent longing. When I was thirteen, at a phase that educators used to the awkward age, my parents were at their wits' end. We lived in the Bukovina, today an almost astronomically remote province in southeastern Europe. The story I am telling seems as distant - not only in space but also in time - as if I'd merely dreamed it. Yet it begins as a very ordinary story.

I had been expelled by a consilium abeundi - an advisory board with authority to expel unworthy students - from the schools of the then Kingdom of Rumania, whose subjects we had become upon the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after the first great war. An attempt to harmonize the imbalances in my character by means of strict descipline at a boarding school in Styria (my people still regarded Austria as our cultural homeland) nearly led to the same ignominious end, and only my pseudo-voluntary departure from the institution in the nick of time prevented my final ostracism from the privileged ranks of those for whom the path to higher education was open. Again in the jargon of those assigned the responsible task of raising children to become "useful members of society," I was a "birtually hopeless case." My parents, blind to how the contradictions within me had grown out of the highly charged difference between their own natures, agreed with the schoolmasters; the mix of neurotic sensitivity and a tendency to violence, alert perception and inability to learn, tender need for support and lack of adjustability, would only develop into somthing criminal.

One of the trivial aphorisms my generation owes to Wilhelm Busch's Pious Helene is the homily "Once your reputation's done / You can live a life of fun." But this optimistic notion results more from wishful thinking than from practical experience. In my case, had anyone asked me about my state of mind, I would have sighed and answered, "Skushno!". Even though rebellious thoughts occasionally surged within me, I dragged myself, or rather I let myself be dragged, listlessly through my bleak existence in the snail's pace of days. Nor was I ever free of a sense of guilt, for my feeling guilty was not entirely foiseted upon me by others; there were deep reasons I could not explain to myself; had I been able to do so, my life would have been much easier."