the intellect returns.

I've had lots of good sleep recently, leading to all kinds of strange conditions, like not falling asleep during the day, and holding more context in my head at once. As Anna points out, these are not necessarily the first things I want to recover--most of me would prefer to be jogging or doing aikido again--but they're no less real for my stubborn ingratitude. She pointed out that I'm reading more books at once, on steadily more esoteric subjects: I've been chewing through all of Terry Pratchett's Discworld books, which aren't challenging, only numerous (I think I've read about 20 out of 40something), but also Cixin Lu's Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy, and the surprisingly erudite-yet-accessible The Chinese Typewriter: A History. For truly boring books, I slogged through A Natural History of the Piano, and after many, many months, I finished Cuisine and Empire: Cooking In World History, which isn't terribly obscure, but does contain a lot of detail I didn't just want to skim past.

Looking at my lists, I think the number of books I can usefully rotate through, approximated by how many books I can return to and pick up the thread of the text, is going up, as well as how many of those books live in the world outside undergraduate syllabi.

Learning stuff is fun. Not for any particular reason, except what the Nobel-laureate physicist(/chauvinist/womanizing asshole) Richard Feynman called "the joy of finding things out." I doubt I'll ever find a use for the contents of Worlds Without End: The Many Lives of the Multiverse (a history of many-worlds/universes theories from antiquity until now), but more to the point, I'm not sure why it should have to be useful in order to be interesting.