What makes this passage sing is Heinlein's refusal to rank the skills—comfort for the dying sits alongside butchering a hog with perfect equality, suggesting that human dignity consists in competence across the humble and the grand, the physical and the intellectual, without hierarchy. He's not arguing for Renaissance men out of nostalgia, but rather exposing how modern specialization has narrowed us into fragments of what we might be. A contemporary surgeon who cannot comfort a grieving family member, or a poet who panics changing a child's diaper, has accepted a diminishment that our ancestors (through necessity, not virtue) simply could not afford. The quote matters because it quietly insists that wholeness requires showing up fully to life's unglamorous necessities as much as its noble ambitions.