Prevent the decline of wissensdurstig

“The flow of the river is ceaseless and its water is never the same."
-from Hōjōki by Kamo no Chōmei.

It was autumn in 2012. Once I remember a professor cited this famous beginning in the very first lecture of Fluid Mechanics, and said this is described in the Eulerian specification of the flow field looking from a hydrodynamic point of view, then he asked one of students, "How do you translate the begging into the Lagrangian specification?" Fortunately the question was asked to a student behind me and I was relieved since I was none the wiser. Now I feel this lecture was the first encounter with real physics despite having learnt physics for four years until then. 

One thing I value in everyday life is to keep having curiosity. Collins dictionary provides a good definition for curiosity, that is:

1. an eager desire to know; inquisitiveness

Good. But I came to know a better word in German from a book I read last autumn, the word which is wissensdurstig. The word can be divided into Wissen and durstig, which mean knowledge and thirsty respectively. Hence, wissendurstig means a thirst for knowledge. I think there's no better word than wissensdurstig that expresses "a strong desire to know". Unfortunately Japanese word for curiosity, 好奇心, lacks of this nuance because it literally means the mind that is fond of the unusual. 

Anyways, why I wrote about the encounter with fluid mechanics and wissendurstig was because I am thirst for what I am interested in after drinking some unnourishing liquids.