The liberal arts

When I got home from college on Christmas break in the late 1970s, after days of intense studying and exams, I was always a zombie, barely able to defeat my brother at Pong (then the height of video game technology). So I was impressed the other day to chat with a current college student who had just arrived home on break but still showed amazing enthusiasm for her anthropology coursework on Amazonian tribes, just hours after taking her exams and completing her final essays. It always took me weeks of recuperation after semester's end to be able to even think about Hegel or eutrophication or "The Aeneid" without gibbering.