The author's grandpa reminds me of Sam Hamilton from East of Eden, someone who (though fictional, of course) I think about often when I think about the kind of

The author's grandpa reminds me of Sam Hamilton from East of Eden, someone who (though fictional, of course) I think about often when I think about the kind of man I'd like to be some day. A couple lines in particular jumped out at me: > He had a visual vocabulary that amazed me > do you know what it is like to make your whole life? These two lines together hint at a kind of connectedness with the world that I sometimes feel (and observe in certain cases) an acute lack of. I see it in myself and in many people I care about, but also in the archetypes generated by the culture/society I'm embedded in. A lot of the time when I talk to people about this particular thing, they assume I'm being nostalgic, but I don't think so. I think we don't realize how many hard (as in "hard science") truths we really learn from casual observations of the wind and the stars and the trees.