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I’ve realised more elaboration is needed on my personality to understand why I would come to the conclusion that joining an organised religion was necessary. After all, many people in today’s society find an identity and meaning to their life by joining a subculture, like biker gangs or goths, or by becoming a fan of a particular sports team or devoting themselves to a hobby. Others become volunteers at homeless shelters or tree planting centres, or activists for a cause. So why not choose any one of these options?

I’ve always been searching for an explanation.

Ever since as young as I can remember I loved reading. According to my parents I started at age 3, and by mid-primary school I was devouring everything I could find. Seriously, think Matilda. Stuff that was above my age bracket. Fiction and non-fiction. Of course this meant that I did well at school but that was never the aim for me per se. I just loved learning and if that meant I got good report cards, happy days. Intrinsic motivation drove me to pore over the Oxford Dictionary, atlases and encyclopaedias. I learned about history, geography, science, languages. I loved seeing the periodic table, the biological phylum family tree, the Indo-European language family tree, and timelines and tables about the nations. To this day I still love poring over maps and stats.

Then why didn’t I become a scientist, fitting into the sci-fi loving ‘geek’ subculture which is widespread in our times and has the added bonus of prestige and potential for high paying jobs in our times?

Maybe my interest in the humanities was piqued by the closer link to historical fiction literature and the fantasy novels that were so popular when I was growing up. Maybe it was the enthralling Horrible Histories series by Terry Deary, or the Wally’s World magazine collections in geography and then history that I assiduously collected at that critical primary school age alongside scattered comic books that are more widely popular. Maybe it was because my father always took me along while he was birdwatching, snorkelling and hiking in the mountains, and fostered in me a deeper love for nature and the world in its more primal, wild state than the world of machines that seems to be our urban present and probable (certainly sci-fi) future. A love for biology over chemistry and physics. A love for the past and the eternal over the future and the changing. A love for universals, which physics and chemistry certainly deal with, yes, but less abstract.

To be honest, the division between the ‘humanities’ or ‘arts’ and the ‘hard science’ maths-centred world of abstract calculations, upon which all our modern technology depends was not my own decision but forced upon me by current paradigms in education which are influenced by prevailing philosophies. I felt immense anguish in late high school at the thought that I would soon have to ‘specialise’, at the very least into one of the degree types offered at university (and it had to be university!): Arts or Sciences, with a few other options like business studies, law and architecture, maybe medicine and that was it. I considered and tried for medicine, with my father being in allied health and its helping-people-and-getting-well-paid combo appealing to me like countless others, but I did not pass the Year 12 entry exam and did not have the specific interest in it to pursue a bridging course. I never had interest in business, seeming the least related to my intellectual goals. What were they again? Oh yeah:

THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING!

But seriously I didn’t think like Stephen Hawking, looking for a formula that would explain the universe. I was brought up within an evangelical church-going household where God was meant to be experienced in the spirit. Music, dance, even witnessing the peculiar phenomenon of glossolalia or speaking in tongues at times, the gratitude to God for bringing you to the top of a mountain safely at sunrise. The ‘oceanic feeling’ as Freud calls it, echoing the German Romantics. It was a profoundly subjective and aesthetic experience. But unlike some of the subjectivities that have evolved in modernity to be enjoyed by some and not others (heavy metal, anyone), I liked the aesthetics that most fitted classical understandings of beauty, and these seemed to have been set a very long time ago in the Western tradition, at least since classical Greece.

Did I mention I really loved Latin too?

I went to a selective secondary school in the UK where French and German were compulsory for the first two or three years, and then in third year Latin was offered. I loved learning all languages, which I put down to the school’s exceptionally strong language department as well as my natural flare for it. Latin was where it really started to get interesting for me. I always found recognising cognates, or words that are derived from the same root, easy in French and German. They share a lot with English. Latin added the historical dimension. Not only did it fascinate me that the language of Rome evolved into French, Spanish and Italian, but I also loved learning about the empire that conquered Britain 2000 years ago, that forms the backdrop to the events of the New Testament, and that left huge relics visible today like Hadrian’s Wall not far from where I grew up. I had, of course, visited it.

It’s a shame my education was not classical enough to learn that architecture also has universals (Quadrivium, anyone?). I loved old buildings, always feeling fascinated and happy in the pre-19th century dominated architecture that was so common in most areas of the UK and Europe. When I moved to Australia I would learn to enjoy the aesthetic of Australia, with its clean new streetscapes, the corrugated metal roofs forming elegant colonial-era verandas for the endless bungalows bathed in pure antipodean sunshine. But I had deep, deep nostalgia. Not just for my Britain, but the almost impalpable ancient stone roots of human integration into the landscape of the whole continent.

So at 16, just before I moved to Australia, it looked like I would take A-levels in Latin and at least one other language, 2 out of my 4 options which would have forced me to specialise possibly go on to study ancient history, archaeology, or some combination of languages and teaching or even law or some other subject that would take high humanities A-levels. I don’t know what direction I would have taken in those years. But that was my trajectory and it was totally waylaid by moving to a land where history barely goes back 300 years and learning Latin sounds like an absurd folly. My growing interest in Linguistics continued but I did not find a proper outlet for it at school, where the well-rounded all-boys Anglican private school curriculum only allowed me one language – French (with the choices I was not allowed of Mandarin and Indonesian fostering a lingering fascination with Asia..) and filled my days with sports carnivals and other pageantry. I did excel in English, being put into the top stream of literature. However, in all other subjects, I found, whether due to the different education system a shift in my own mentality, or a lack of readiness for the more mature self-directed study now expected of me that was required to memorise formulas efficiently and reach the highest grades in an overtly competitive classroom environment; my grades suffered. I finished with an ATAR impressive enough to get me into any uni but not at the level needed to enter the most prestigious courses.