Chapter LXX

LXX

Not for me. I have had my nineteen years and they were good ones.

For the ones coming.

There is a boy somewhere right now who is fourteen and who has the thing. You know the thing. The sitting still. The not getting bored. The willingness to be beaten by a problem for a week, which is rarer than intelligence and worth more than it.

And he is going to ask a question and receive a complete, correct, immediate answer, and it is going to feel exactly like help.

And he will never learn what he had, because you only find that out by being stuck, and he is not going to be stuck. Not once. Not for the whole of his education.

I am asking you to let him be stuck.

That is the entire prayer. Let one thing be hard enough that he has to stay with it. Let one door be closed. One is enough. One was always enough.

I am not asking for a hard life for him. I am asking for a single locked room and the time to sit down outside it.