“To me, there is no career as useful or as fitting as that of bigwig. As a young man, my dream was to be a bigwig. I lacked, however, a father’s advice, and so I have ended up as you can see, with no other consolation or moral support beyond the hopes I place in you. So listen to me carefully, son; listen and learn. You are young, you naturally possess the fire, the exuberance, and the impulsiveness of your years; do not reject them, but moderate them so that by the time you’re forty-five, you are ready to enter the age of measure and reason. The wise man who said, “Gravity is a mystery of the body invented to conceal the defects of the mind,” defined the very essence of a bigwig. Do not confuse this gravity with the other kind, which, although also present in outward appearances, is a pure reflex or emanation of the mind; the gravity of which I speak is a matter only of the body, whether natural or acquired. As for the age of forty-five . . .”

“Yes, indeed, why forty-five?”

“It is not, as you might suppose, an arbitrary number plucked out of the air; it is the normal age at which the phenomenon occurs. Generally speaking, the true bigwig begins to appear between the ages of forty-five and fifty, although some cases do occur between fifty-five and sixty, but these are rare. There are also some who emerge at forty, and others even earlier, at thirty-five or even thirty; they are not, however, at all common. I won’t even mention those who become bigwigs at twenty-five; such precocity is the privilege of genius.”

“I see.”

“But let’s get to the main point. Once you have embarked on this career, you must be extremely cautious about any ideas you may cultivate, either for your own use or for the use of others. The best thing would be not to have any ideas at all. This is something you can easily grasp by imagining, for example, an actor deprived of the use of one arm. He can, through sheer talent and skill, conceal his disability from the audience, but it would nevertheless be much better for him to have both arms. The same is true of ideas; it is possible, by violent effort, to smother or conceal them permanently, but that is a very rare skill, and not one conducive to the normal enjoyment of life.”

“But who says that I—”