He had an edgy insecurity and said, “I have never been educated in any branch of learning. There are great gaps in my knowledge.” To fill the gaps, he read. “He read,” his brother Abraham said, “as he ate.” He devoured books, read everything, read omnivorously, from English literature to Huxley and Darwin. He felt he had to learn. His insecurities never fully left him. He talked of “sleepless nights and days of acute fear . . . a maddening nervousness which prevented me from having a quiet moment.”
