The next year I was off to college myself, at the University of Virginia—founded by Thomas Jefferson, with a core designed in complete architectural detail by him.

Along with Leonardo da Vinci, Jefferson was a personal hero of mine (to the extent that I have heroes. Maybe “role models” would be a more accurate term.)  What drew me to both of them was their having talents in more than just one area (as I had also discovered about myself), and translating those talents into actual accomplishments.

At UVA, I could literally feel the history of the place.  Its founder was commonly referred to simply as “Mr. Jefferson”—as if he were still alive and periodically inviting students to dinner at Monticello, his home on a nearby hilltop, as he had frequently done during his lifetime.

When I took a tour of Monticello—which he had also designed, and which has often been described as one of the most livable of architectural masterpieces, filled with ingenious features of his own devising to suit his chosen lifestyle—his presence felt even more real and immanent.

Later in my life, when I got into photography and painting, I would come to realize that many of the things I chose to depict had a similarly distinctive and enduring character or essence about them—even though I had no idea whose essence that might be.  Much later still, I would find this interest dovetailing remarkably well with speculations about what an afterlife might look like.

But in the near term came some revised thinking about what I wanted to do with my life.

At the time I enrolled at Virginia, I thought I’d most likely go on to law school from there, and then maybe the FBI, or possibly even politics.  But in the course of checking out an on-campus group of one of the major political parties, I was made aware of and asked to participate in some sleazy tactics that made me doubt a political career was really for me.

At the same time, a couple of introductory courses made me fall in love with psychology.  Psych was at that point still an infant science, bursting with opportunities to do groundbreaking experiments in any number of areas.  It was also about people, and what made them tick—a subject that’s inherently fascinating.

Unfortunately, UVA didn’t have much of a psych department at the time, so I transferred at the end of my second year to one of the leading schools in the field, Stanford.