What I have lived for ... is to stay away from savants?

I know for sure that this guy will agree with the following quote:

I've made an odd discovery. Every time I talk to a savant I feel quite sure that happiness is no longer a possibility. Yet when I talk with my gardener, I'm convinced of the opposite.

That put down of the savant was by one of the greatest thinkers in modern times: Bertrand Russell.  This pretentious thinker agrees with Russell.  Which is why, for instance, I avoid faculty meetings ;)

In  the prologue to his autobiography, Russell wrote:

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.

I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy - ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness--that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what--at last--I have found.

With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.

Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.

This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.

It will be extremely hard to discount the importance of those three that were Russell's passions.

Source

It is a wonderful reminder that giants like Russell have paved the very path that I travel.  How foolish of me to even think that I am traveling a road that is not taken!

As I ease into the final third of my life, looking back at the years that have gone by, I, too, would gladly live it again and take those same paths.  Of course, there have been disappointments and frustrations along the way.  But what is life without them!