[Blushes a little at the mention of his whatever-he-is.]
"Learning, yay" just about covers it. I'm a Magister of the Imperium, I've been studying magic my whole life. [So the scholar comment is right.]
The information on magic I can find here is completely strange, so you could say there's some simple curiosity involved. For example, in Thedas, runes aren't used the way it's described here. Runes are applied to weapons and armor, to infuse them with magic. No one draws them in the air in order to cast spells.