“Neither do I. Come to the door. Look at every clock you can see. Are they not all stopped?”
“Yes. Maybe the power has gone off all over town.”
“You know it has not. There are still lighted windows in those buildings, though it is quite late.”
“Why are you playing with me? I am neither on the inside nor the outside. Either tell me the secret or say that you will not tell me.”
“The secret isn’t a simple one. It can only be arrived at after all philosophy and learning have been assimilated.”
“One man cannot arrive at that in one lifetime.”
“Not in an ordinary lifetime. But the secret of the secret (if I may put it that way) is that one must use part of it as a tool in learning. You could not learn all in one lifetime, but by being permitted the first step—to be able to read, say, sixty books in the time it took you to read one, to pause for a minute in thought and use up only one second, to get a day’s work accomplished in eight minutes and so have time for other things—by such ways one may make a beginning. I will warn you, though. Even for the most intelligent, it is a race.”
“A race? What race?”
“It is a race between success, which is life, and failure, which is death.”
“Let’s skip the melodrama. How do I get into the state and out of it?”