Some people believe that magic isn't real. I know otherwise. What could we even consider to be magic in the first place? There is a famous saying where I am from "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" here's the corollary "Any sufficiently explained magic is indistinguishable from technology". We have explained away the wonder from everything. Let me explain my current situation. My current experience. I am using my fingers on a device with many little squares. These squares are white with glowing runes of various color changing in pulsating rhythm. This device is fairly small and connected to nothing. As I touch each square depressing it, another device a foot away responds by displaying the same rune at a point on it's surface. This other device, is a fairly small rectangular slab whose surface is like paper which illuminates it self at my will and responds to my direct touch. It can display all manner of black and white image, but it is mostly used for books. As books are concerned it contains within it hundreds of tomes, and if I so desire can call for more from unseen libraries from anywhere across the planet with a few taps of my fingers. FUCKING MAGIC. There of course are explanations for all of these things. This didn't come about out of no where. There were alchemists who spent lifetimes mixing random chemicals to see the effects. There were people who were observant to every random interaction between objects and learned to manipulate them. All of these observations and interactions were compiled over centuries until we arrived at this device whose insides are literally millions of inscriptions of gold layered on top of each other connecting rare gems and minerals together in just the right way, with just the right incantations written in just the right languages, stored in just the right way. If you want you can learn those languages, or older deader languages. Lisp, cobol, fortran, C, java. You can learn the methods of connecting the gems, or how they are fashioned out of their raw components. You can steal the wonder from the act of performing magic. Or you can accept this entirely rigorous, human effort of decoding reality as something purely mystical and operate with it in that way. I wanted to learn everything. When I was young there wasn't a thing in the world that I didn't want to understand. The first order then was the domain of information itself. How better to go about learning everything than to learn how we find collect and organize information? Our world doesn't allow a person to reach adulthood without also forcing them to learn a basic context of the order of the world. Mathematics, history, geology, geography, literature, science, language, art. .