So I am telling a younger friend of mine about a strange incident that happened when I was eighteen. I don’t remember well why I mentioned it. It just happened to come up in the conversation while we were talking. I mean, it was something that had happened a long time ago. Ancient history. And besides, I never managed to come to any conclusion. “I had already graduated from high school then, but I wasn’t yet attending university,” I explained. “I was what they call an ‘academic ronin,’ a student who failed the university entrance exams and was waiting to try again. Everything was up in the air, you could say,” I continued, “but that didn’t bother me much. I knew that, if I wanted, I could attend a relatively decent private school. But my parents insisted that I try to get into a public university, so I took the exams, knowing from the start that this story would end in a fiasco. And as expected, I failed.
At that time, the university exams necessarily included mathematics, and I had no interest whatsoever in calculus. I spent the next year mainly killing time, as if I were constructing an alibi. Instead of going crazy with tutoring to prepare to retake the exams, I went back and forth to the local library and immersed myself in reading bulky novels. My parents imagined I was going there to study. What can you do, that’s life. I found it much more enjoyable to read Balzac than to delve into the principles of calculus.