The thing that hit me after coming back from the war, was how absolutely meaningless the vast majority of life’s required set of petty exercises are. I understa

The thing that hit me after coming back from the war, was how absolutely meaningless the vast majority of life’s required set of petty exercises are. I understand the elitism and the challenge of conquering Yale. There seems, however, to be a monumental difference between him and the rest; that is, 26 years of hardship, quiet observation, and directed action in shaping the world before reaching toward a philosophical understanding of it, versus young people desperately seeking that relevance for themselves, but only within the bounds of perfect physical and emotional comfort, perhaps not realizing that their pontifications are more limbic than neocortical. Downrange was my “safe space”; it gives a name to that limbic fear and drops a lot of emotional pretense otherwise. Stanford, not so much. What I found impressive there was the Sisyphean devotion to transforming ones mind into a perfect vessel of discovery, creation, and healing. I didn’t really respect it until I started to see that path as a superior way of being to my own, and made my best effort to commit to it despite the overwhelming disadvantage of time. Perhaps someday I too will see the same moral superiority in the screeds of elite youth in the humanities and social sciences. He was, after all, a far greater man in his first career than I ever will be.