accelerated time. And if one takes the tongues in order, from the
most familiar to the most remote, there is no real difficulty. He
acquired fifty for a starter, and could always add any other any
evening that he found he had a need for it. And at the same time
he began to assemble and consolidate knowledge. Of literature,
properly speaking, there are no more than ten thousand books that
are really worth reading and falling in love with. These were
gone through with high pleasure, and two or three thousand of
them were important enough to be reserved for future rereading.

History, however, is very uneven; and it is necessary to read
texts and sources that for form are not worth reading. And the
same with philosophy. Mathematics and science, pure or physical,
could not, of course, be covered with the same speed. Yet, with
time available, all could be mastered. There is no concept ever
expressed by any human mind that cannot be comprehended by any
other normal human mind, if time is available and it is taken in
the proper order and context and with the proper preparatory
work.

And often, and now more often, Vincent felt that he was touching
the fingers of the secret; and always, when he came near it, it
had a little bit the smell of the pit.

For he had pegged out all the main points of the history of man;
or rather most of the tenable, or at least possible, theories of
the history of man. It was hard to hold the main line of it, that
double road of rationality and revelation that should lead always
to a fuller and fuller development (not the fetish of progress,
that toy word used only by toy people), to an unfolding and
growth and perfectibility.

But the main line was often obscure and all but obliterated, and
traced through fog and miasma. He had accepted the Fall of Man
and the Redemption as the cardinal points of history. But he
understood now that neither happened only once, that both were of
constant occurrence; that there was a hand reaching up from that
old pit with its shadow over man. And he had come to picture that
hand in his dreams (for his dreams were especially vivid when in
the state) as a six-digited monster reaching out. He began to
realize that the thing he was caught in was dangerous and deadly.

Very dangerous.

Very deadly.

One of the weird books that he often returned to and which
continually puzzled him was the Relationship of Extradigitalism
to Genius, written by the man whose fac