nce upon a time, according to a writer in The Arabian Nights, there lived a very wise old man—and wise he must have been—who made it the work of his life to collect all the wisdom in the world.
He wrote an enormous and learned volume, setting forth everything he had found and, at last, sat back contented with a task well done.
Presently, his contentment was dissipated by the thought that he had written too much.
So he sat himself down for ten years more and reduced the original volume to one a tenth its size.
When he had finished, he again thought himself content, but again discovered he was wrong. With painstaking exactitude, he reduced this second work to a single page. Another ten years passed and the ancient philosopher grew even wiser. He took that single page and reduced it to just a single line which contained everything there was to be known.
A decade more found the old scribe close to death.
