Curiosity

When I was in 10th grade I had a class that I loved called World Studies. Actually it was two classes, English and History, but they were linked. When we studied the ancients in history we read Aeschylus and Sophocles and Euripides, then we studied English colonization and read Heart of Darkness, then we transitioned to Asia by watching Apocalypse Now, on to Siddhartha and Survival in Auschwitz (and the attendant historical eras). It was a class that fed my natural curiosity and my appreciation of both fact and fiction.

It also had the added bonus of making me feel smart later on in life. I mean, I've always felt pretty confident about my intelligence in most venues with most people, but being a college dropout gave me a bit of an inferiority complex when I finally went back. Especially on the first day of the quiz section for a core class I had to take when I finally declared my English major. That day happened to be the 10 year anniversary of the day I first started college so I was feeling especially insecure, but the first question the prof asked was about Clytemnestra.

Lately I've been wondering what happened to all that intellectual curiosity I had when I was 15. I must still have it, but not being in school seems to have made it dormant.