Remember that wonder? Your parents. Your teachers and professors? Great minds in

Remember that wonder? Your parents. Your teachers and professors? Great minds in great books? The sense that there exists an endless series of undiscovered valleys where you can shop for interesting ideas, gaining a little more knowledge, power, and control over your world as you learn?

But at some point you may become a master, then a teacher, at another point a professor, and possibly a prophet.

And the process, like aging backwards, is terrifying. There are no undiscovered valleys, neatly plowed and sown. All that’s left is an infinite darkness into which you can, with your accumulated wisdom, peer only a short distance, and even then, dimly; treading cautiously, aware of your ignorance, despite all the shoulders of the past that you stand upon.

it’s not all that pleasant really. It’s just very humbling.