Study why

«What is geometry for?» This is the question that my son – whom we will call Ettore – asked me in a slightly altered tone at the fourth of 12 orthogonal projections to be delivered within the following day. It's 6pm and he's just got back from school. I would like to tell him with all my heart: «Dear son, it doesn't help a blessed stone», especially since there is still dinner to prepare and the little one is tugging at my pants because he wants to play Minecraft and I beg for the password. But I obviously can't answer him like that, and so I don't know how these words come out of my mouth: «In the meantime, you need them to understand that you'll never be a surveyor when you grow up».

he'll ask me the same question an hour later because there are still 22 pages to review for an art history test. Arriving at the page on the Riace bronzes, while we are 10 meters under the sea and 300 meters from the Calabrian coast, where in 1972 a diver found an arm protruding from the seabed in front of him, Ettore asked me: «But what is study the history of art?' Here too, I would like to say to him: "Dear son, at this hour of the evening it doesn't help a single stone", but now, having seen the success of my first answer, I say to him: "It helps to understand that when you grow up you will never be a diver". Evidently this time my answer sounds a little less inspired than the first, in fact the boy rightly raises the bar: «I have already understood that I will never be a surveyor or a diver or a mathematician, none of the things I study will never, so I don't need to continue studying!». At this point the going gets really tough, and so like cowards I answer him with a question: «If it is true that warm air goes upwards, why is it cold at the top of the mountains? Can you answer me?». "No I do not know". «Dear young man, this is what studying is for: it is for learning to answer decently the questions your children will ask you».


Gothic Andrea
NP May 2023