The world had long been promised a fifty-volume definitive analysis
on the meaning of life by the brilliant and internationally
respected Professor de Laix. Admirers from all across the surface
of the earth produced unremitting and enthusiastic requests--nay,
demands--for the wise professor to bestow upon the world his
penetrating insights into human nature. As the years passed,
however, even though he had been begged repeatedly for the first
part, or a first volume, or even a first chapter, he had always
answered that he wanted to get the whole work clearly in his head
before he put it down on paper.
"To rush precipitously forward without knowing precisely where one
wants to go," he would tell them, "will not of necessity produce a
happy outcome because it might lead to a complicative erroneity or
put one on a train to a destination he would not ultimately wish to
visit. After all, the most beautiful part of a given day is known
only after dark, and the best path up the mountain--which I take to
be the path of true wisdom--is seen only from the top."
Year after year, therefore, arrived with hope and left disappointed;
new generations were born and millions of hopeful readers mingled
their own dust with that of the earth without the benefit of even a
phrase of Professor de Laix' wisdom.
Then one spring his colleagues and students noticed that he was
gradually becoming more and more animated, and was heard
occasionally to mutter, "Yes, yes, that's right, that's right."
Finally one day while he was sitting in a coffee shop regaling a few
favorite students with tales of fruitless thinking journeys upon
which he had in the past embarked, he took a sip of coffee (or
perhaps he had inadvertently been served espresso) and then suddenly
opened his eyes widely, sprang to his feet, and announced excitedly,
"That's it! I see it all now! Now it can be written! Everything
is completely clear! So clear! Ha ha! Now I understand! Now, at
last, I understand!"
After this brief speech, he burst out of the coffee shop (leaving
his students with expressions of amazement and an unpaid bill) and
began to run toward his office where he could finally sit down and
produce his great work. Now at last he could pour forth his
hitherto inexpressible wisdom to fertilize the orchards of culture
and bring into being a new and wonderful fruit for civilization to
munch upon.
Unfortunately, in his highly focused and externally oblivious rush
toward his office, he neglected to watch for the traffic as he
crossed the busy boulevard between the coffee shop and the
university (for academia is often separated from the rest of life by
just such a metaphor), and as a result he was tragically but
thoroughly run down by a fully loaded manure truck, whose cargo had
been produced after only one day's rumination, and whose owner also
hoped that it would swell the fruit on the trees of a less
figurative orchard.
Such was the life and death of the great Professor de Laix, a man
for whom someday almost came.