The Know-It-All

I just finished a very silly book called The Know-It-All, about a guy who reads the Encyclopedia Britannica in order to become the smartest person in the world. It was a bit of a slog, but there were a couple of passages (out of nearly 400 pages) that struck me.

A fable recounted to the author by a family friend: "This [Middle Eastern] potentate called a meeting of the wise men in his kingdom, and he said, 'I want you to gather all the world's knowledge together in one place so that my sons can read it and learn.' The wise men went off, and after a year, they came back with twenty-five volumes of knowledge. The potentate looked at it and he said, 'No. It's too long. Make it shorter.' So the wise men went off for another year and they came back with one single volume. The potentate looked at it and said, 'No. Still too long.' So the wise men went off for another year. When they came back, they gave the potentate a single piece of paper with one sentence on it. A single sentence. You know what the sentence was? The sentence was: 'This too shall pass.'"

An excerpt from the encyclopedia entry on Tolstoy referring to Anna Karenina's brother Stiva: "Stiva, though never wishing ill, wastes resources, neglects his family and regards pleasure as the purpose of life. The figure of Stiva is perhaps designed to suggest that evil, no less than good, derives from the small moral choices human beings make moment by moment."