[ryangittins]

I'm relatively young, so perhaps I'm just incapable of fully understanding the impact of the classics throughout the course of a lifetime as you describe it. I like poetry and Shakespeare and whatnot, and they have impacted me in some profound ways (Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep when my grandma passed away) as well as things that taught me how read, write, and interpret things better. I'm also in a technical field, and at times I do find myself a bit envious of those in the humanities. I do supplement with books and poetry and whatnot, and I'm very proud to have a skill set which is valuable and a field which fulfills me, but the humanities have always felt like a hobby. A hobby I love, mind you, but still just a hobby. I don't know how things will play out, but I hope I'll wind up well-rounded, with plenty of soft skills, technical skills, entertainment, and things to ponder.

[walterbell]

At age 10, I would have liked to know that poetry, cryptography, geometry, music, art and architecture were related. We need more transdisciplinary research and role models like Charles Peirce, http://peirce.org/

"Who is the most original and the most versatile intellect that the Americas have so far produced? The answer "Charles S. Peirce" is uncontested, because any second would be so far behind as not to be worth nominating. [He was] mathematician, astronomer, chemist, geodesist, surveyor, cartographer, metrologist, spectroscopist, engineer, inventor; psychologist, philologist, lexicographer, historian of science, mathematical economist, lifelong student of medicine; book reviewer, dramatist, actor, short story writer; phenomenologist, semiotician, logician, rhetorician and metaphysician.

He was, for a few examples, the first modern experimental psychologist in the Americas, the first metrologist to use a wave-length of light as a unit of measure, the inventor of the quincuncial projection of the sphere, the first known conceiver of the design and theory of an electric switching-circuit computer, and the founder of "the economy of research." He is the only system-building philosopher in the Americas who has been both competent and productive in logic, in mathematics, and in a wide range of sciences. If he has had any equals in that respect in the entire history of philosophy, they do not number more than two."