Did you ever sit in a classroom and have the sudden, deep, empty realization that you didn't know what the heck the professor was talking about?
So you listen closer, and study harder, and it only gets worse, as though there was some little detail in a lecture or book you missed that would have unlocked it all if only you'd been paying attention.
That was my experience in Multivariate Calculus and eventually Physics. I asked for help from classmates, but it came in tepid dribbles that announced with each drop of advice, "This is elementary and I don't have time to explain this to you."
And so I returned to my first love, words, and became an English Major, which is where my heart had been all along, and why the measured and metered Milton and Pope (Alexander) appealed to me more than Newton and Einstein.
I love science to this day and consume enormous amounts of it, but I wouldn't have been an insightful physicist.
Insights into literature, language, and philosophy come easily to me. When I'm tempted to privately celebrate myself, I recall the times when things did not come so easily.
[2014-07-15]
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