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Rereading my first impression of what became my major (assessed as an eighteen-year-old neuroscience major) sounds like something out of a movie. Relationships don't really start like this.

On one hand I remember my frustration and my argument remains valid. I've always been an empiricist, though I'm not as brutal as I used to be, and my call to "make a physical difference with your work instead of postulating hollow, sophistic nonsense that boils down to nothing more than circular reasoning" still rings true. On the other hand, as I rack up years in college hours in literature I feel like I'm finally learning to value abstraction.

I've spent most of my intellectual life devaluing the intangible, deriding the liberal arts for concentrating on invisible ideas rather than concrete truths. As my eighteen-year-old self so venomously put it, "What keeps you alive and able to articulate such ill-defined principles are the ion concentrations in your neurons, not some metaphysical connection to universal mythemes." Sure, it's the ion concentrations that keep you alive, but maybe it's the simple realization of human togetherness that keeps you wanting to live. Or not.

I know it's college-student cliche to finally immerse yourself in Plato and fall in love with the theory of recollection not just because it's fascinating, but because you've articulated it, too. You can laugh because before now I've never gone through Herodotus, Thucydides, or Livy (my place-in-history obsession hasn't died) or because I've never written about Cicero or Vergil. The ideas might not be new--I could argue history and philosophy before I read any of it; the theories are familiar to anyone who's been in school. But for a science-hardened neophyte, the opportunity to draw my own conclusions from the texts I've heard about for so long has proven surprisingly satisfying. My mind (and my library) is richer for the experience.