It was a place where no one save the family and its intimates could penetrate. ... A rich and varied, but nonetheless an enclosed, environment, it reinforced in more than one way Ludwig's feelings of isolation. First it confined him to a small circle in which, as we have seen, the parents for all their good will could not, by reason of character and preoccupations, supply a vital sustaining warmth. There was affection from the brothers and sisters, to be sure; a slightly off-hand masculine kind from Paul, an enthusiastic and demonstrative kind from the sisters for their dear, their good Luki. It was clear that they wished him everything good, even, as Gretl once said, the good things he could not wish for himself, but they were sisters, with the normal tensions of a family relationship heightened by the open concern evident in that family for each other's spiritual as well as physical well-being; they were, moreover, (by the standards of childhood and youth) much older sisters. Ludwig needed, and always felt the need of, a friend. Here another influence from his home environment came into play — the moral, cultural, and even social fastidiousness which made most human relationships irksome for him, the more so, no doubt, because he was not at first exposed to a great variety of them. During the First War he was fond of quoting Schopenhauer's parable of the porcupines who crowded together for warmth on a winter's day and then drew apart to avoid one another's spines and so moved to and fro until they found a moderate distance that they could support. So it is with men too:

The middling distance that they eventually find, which makes life together possible, is politeness and good manners.

True it gives an incomplete satisfaction to the need for mutual warmth, but to make up for that no one gets pricked by the spines. But a man who has a great deal of inner warmth (a man of great qualities) will prefer neither to cause nor to receive annoyance and will avoid the society of others: if such men there be, Ludwig was certainly not one of them. He possessed in a high degree — too high for what most people would count as happiness — both the need for affection and for warmth and a sensitivity to the frictions and differences inseparable from any relationship. It is not necessary to think of these qualities — or these degrees of these qualities — as morbid. No doctrine of the mean can be applied to them simply. Both seem to belong to human good, even though a high degree of both makes many things difficult in life. Together with the intensity and concentration that he brought to any task, they made it certain that he would always be regarded as a Sonderling, an eccentric, someone out of the normal run.