He was known to himself from an early age as one who delivered self-lectures.  One that he would now and then orate to himself in bits and pieces was from his college years.  He had been sitting across from a monument to a leader — whom a prosperous people had first proclaimed their savior king, then an autocrat, years hence a true democrat, and finally incarnated evil — and he had been reflecting on how impossible it was to know the true nature of any one or thing.  He then lectured himself, in silence:  If you ever feel that you know — just that, that “I know” — know that you are imagining yourself as other than human.  To know, in that sense, is to be in the realm of the gods. The odds of that are closer to zero than to any other number.  You can observe, you can make guesses, and you can make up stuff in attempts to manipulate the odds.  It is reason why your kind feel confident that mathematics will finally get us to the realm of gods, to knowing.  But remember that it was once the gods of nature who helped us see.  The gods of man’s own nature followed them.  Gods of the nature of numbers have been moving in.  Keep this in mind, but remember most that other gods await us.