When I Think Back on All The Stuff I Learned in School

Sometimes I feel like Stranger in a Strange Land. I’m of this place, but not of this place. And by this place I don’t so much mean the US as the current mode of Western civilization, say, the last 300 years or so.

You see, I can’t exactly claim to have been born and raised in a village that time forgot. I mean, the village I grew up in was ten miles from the second largest city in Portugal, and could be visited in 20 minutes by train.

On the other hand, other than the five or six kids per year...