Going to Columbia College changed my life the most. I stopped competing with the boy in the next desk and started competing with Aristotle and Plato, with Rousseau and Thoreau and Rimbaud.

In the middle of the journey of my life, after two years of college, I cast aside the mathematics and physics that had guided me and entered the dark wood of poetry and prose.

“Let’s see them get me to make a bomb out of this!” I chortled as I neatly wrecked my career.