This is the story of a boy—and later a young man—who rebelled against memorizing most of the things he was required to learn in school. Indeed, he refused to “take to heart” many of the things most adults told him. The lessons he was assigned and the world he was handed made little sense to him. And so he was driven to try to get to the heart of things, to explore what was truly important about a book, a moment in nature, a concept, an experience of another person, a time in history.