Which makes me think, how is Yale? Good school, or overrated? I have to start thinking about these things, or so I'm told. Tim, looks like we are kindred spirits.
My advice to you in terms of choice of college is not to go someplace for “its name” or to waste your life pursuing prestige and cash. I made this mistake, initially. And I may have ruined my life as a result. My grades are not that good simply because I am majoring in Garbage. My classes are boring; I’m simply uninterested in learning this crap and then it spewing back, thus the lack of motivation. I fear that I may have limited my options, so that after graduation I will not be able to pursue my true passions. Investment banking is my main option at the moment—a horrible way to die.
So, choose a college based on your interests. I don’t care if it is Ozark University. I don’t care if it’s a two year college in Alaska. If you’re not pursuing your passions, you’ve got nothing, in my opinion and profound and sad experience.
Here are some fitting excerpts from Diderot’s Encyclopedia. As the age of Enlightenment was winding down and Romanticism was coming to, the concept of the Genius changed radically. No longer was the genius a man of ultra-reasoning capabilities. The genius was now considered to be a man of boundless passion and creativity. Conformity vs. Divergence.
“The man of Genius has a soul with greater range, can, therefore, be struck by feelings of all beings, is concerned with everything in nature, and never receives an idea that does not evoke a feeling: everything stirs him and everything is retained within him.”
“The rules and laws of taste would place shackles on genius: he breaks them to soar to what is sublime, pathetic, or noble. The taste of a man of Genius is defined by his love of this eternal beauty that characterizes nature and by a passion to make his tableaux conform to some kind of model that he has created and according to which he has an idea and a sense of the beautiful. The need to express the passions that move him is continually obstructed by grammar and usage: often the idiom in which he writes hinders the expression of an image that would be sublime in another idiom. . . .Finally strength and abundance, a certain kind of roughness, irregularity, the sublime, and the pathetic—this is the character of genius in the arts; he does not touch lightly, he does not please without astonishment, he even astonishes by his imperfections.”
