My friend, I doubt you realize that my early youth on a wilderness island in Alaska has left me bereft of classical education, and my subsequent prodigal dissolution never availed it to me. I have no more knowledge of Greek than I do Kanji, nor more familiarity with Homer and Hesiod than Laozi and Sun tzu. I confess much of what I know of them I have learned just now from you!

My sentence to government indoctrination camps was predictably useless for anything of merit, and the literature that attracted me was science fiction, illuminating the possibilities opened to mankind by the advent of travel beyond the gravity well of Earth. The ancient riddles of the occult, associated with violence, politics, and incessant obfuscation of valuable technical, civil, and social progress positively repelled me, and I associated such occult with religions, as I yet do, all of which I regard as political propaganda to empower madmen with cannon fodder. Yet somehow I earnestly sought spiritual reality, and partially introduced what I was provided through empirical consideration by tools the scientific method enabled rational examination by.

I am quite adrift in the company of the learned, having only my own conclusions upon which to draw, many of which were found in the bloody chase of my dinner in the forests and coves where I ranged as a youth, casting out any formality, political considerations, or desire for material fortune beyond a dry corner to escape the miserable weather of the cathedral in which I killed my saints and cavorted with sinners. It was they that were my true educators, and the bloody knuckles and skinned knees apportioned by a misspent youth, that is today the glory of my dotage.

Keep teaching, and I will keep learning.

Thanks!