e began wishing there were some way to record everything he spoke, such were the pearls of wisdom that regularly dropped from his swinish lips. This was not a unique idea; he remembers encountering it in superhero comic books: usually, the villain, the Fantastic Four’s nemesis, Dr. Doom, for example, keeps a running record of everything he says and does: a perpetual home video. Aspiring to match the egotism of a comic book super-villain gives him pause. He realizes he is probably experiencing something akin to the error of those practitioners of Zen who reach a preliminary level of transcendental awareness, a level that convinces them that they are completely enlightened, though, in truth, they have simply run into another illusion to discard. Apparently, this delusion of godhood undoes some; others survive it and continue on the path to enlightenment. Still, the appeal of saving all his words was difficult to discard—until it occurred to him that to do so would be to admit poverty. Surely, his fecund brain would always generate a surplus; he should be generous with his pronouncements, let them fall where they may, like the poems Li Po wrote on maple leaves, then delivered to a river.

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