Well, Jenny A. was called away elsewhere.. drat! Still, local felicitations involved a surprise new reheat-the-tea gadget: running at 2.4 GHz yet, with pretty blinking lights.

Thanks for finding such an evocative poem/Odyssey, and a fine wish to boot.

Indeed, as he says -- it's for the most part, a compass-free zone, those early-middle-(to late??) years.. a mirror of the koan, "the lower cannot see the higher;" yet somehow some do manage to sneak peeks.

While in my story, the original (callow) guesstimates were not nearly so idealistic and specific -- I was informed with the ignorance which knows only ~ plod along; it seems to be what this game is about, because everybody around is in similar mode (and nobody told me! that there were (n+1) Other games about which I'd heard no hint, nada, zippo.)

So while his itinerary is alien in most details, some of the little vignettes do quite fit:

... You had to start with classical mechanics and a lab;
Instead of number theory and the satisfactions
Of the private proof, a class of prodigies manquéé
Made jokes in mathematics that I didn't get.

Where the writer managed Richard Burton(!): I wangled a (students get unfilled-seats) close-up of Maurice Evans' version of that same Danish prince presented with (a pretty similar snake-pit to what Obama's about to inherit?)

I think that all the permanent-memory events, though -the precious few- were entirely through happenstance --

{just as, eerily: right-Now someone on NPR is interviewing a prof. from My institute, concerning 'the honor code' re. exams and where/how you take them. DRL would call that synchronicity; me too.}

In the end, are the words. Seems there is a kinship among folks, across all the 'fields' we have artificially named, about using Language: those who started out acquiring a recognition-vocabulary next found certain of these joined the usage-one, because the new one was more al punte, etc. A positive feedback loop, by any other name.

And in the end we also have a name for too-Much self-analysis, eh? Narcissism, curse of a certain-part of the Age (oft Armani-Suited?), I wot.


Cheers,
Ashton