Milo had tremendous respect for learning.
Learning was the most important thing a soul could do. There was an infinity of things to learn and to teach. There was an infinity of ways to get the learning and teaching done.
You could learn from mistakes, to begin with. That was pretty common. Milo’s first mistake, as a baby in India, had been to reach out and grab a Ghaasa spider. The Ghaasa spider bit him on the thumb, and part of his thumb turned black and fell off. And he screamed, and wisely let it go, and didn’t do that again.
You could learn to do things no one had ever done before, if you could imagine them being done. As a Moroccan inventor named Abass Ibn Firnass, Milo decided that it was time for his own species to conquer the air. Constructing himself a framework of wood and heavy paper, he flung himself from the highest roof in Andalusia, and damned if it didn’t work.
For nearly ten minutes, to the wonder of crowds far below, he swooped and glided among the towers and minarets, until at last his momentum slowed and it came time to effect a landing. At this point, he realized that, in so thoroughly studying the elements of flight, he had neglected to develop a protocol for landing. Birds flew with their wings, so he had built himself wings. They land on their tails, however, and Abass had failed to provide himself with one. He survived a hard landing with considerable injury but no regrets.
“You are an angel!” gushed a local poet.
“You are kind,” answered Abass, “but I am a scientist and a friend to man, something a hundred times greater.”
He was an old copper miner whose job was to teach rookies how to drill holes and stuff them with dynamite and then get away before the dynamite was detonated.
He took this teaching very seriously.
So did his students.
Teaching is more likely to be a fine art when a passing grade means you don’t get your ass blown off.
One of the most mysterious of Milo’s lives was lived as Rabbi Aben ben Aben, a revered Jewish mystic. All his life, he sat bent over scrolls and texts. One day he staggered to his feet, a wild look in his eye as if he had unlocked something unlockable, learned something unlearnable.
“What is it, rabboni?” whispered his fellow scholars.
“It’s a trap!” he cried, and fell down dead as a stone.
This was probably an important teaching, except no one, including Milo, understood what it meant.
Milo learned about money and became a famous economist.
He invented the field of “cryptoeconomics.”
It was like the field of “cryptozoology,” which concerned itself with animals that weren’t real, like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster.
Some economists, Milo noted, went around saying that if you helped rich people get richer and didn’t make them pay taxes, eventually that would help out the poor people, too.
“That’s the economic version of Bigfoot,” Milo said on TV.
And he went around talking about cryptoeconomics and making a lot of rich people mad, until one day two strange things happened. One: A lot of economists (in the employ of big companies run by rich people) got together and said that Milo was full of shit. And then two: Milo was on a private-jet flight when the emergency door by his elbow blew out and popped him out of the plane. A farmer who saw him fall out of a clear blue sky did not see the jet, just this guy in an awesome suit who came down in his wheat field.
The big companies became the resource cartels that almost cannibalized the human race.
There are things out there that certain people don’t want you to learn.
Milo had one of those lives where he just couldn’t get ahead. He worked at Subway, and made car payments, and paid rent, and had to buy food and pay the electric bill.
You have to learn a trick or two to live like that. You almost get some money to put aside for school, and the car breaks down. You finally save enough to pay the electric bill, and you get pulled over for having a taillight out.
Milo learned how to use thrift stores and learned how not to have any kids until he got his degree and—
Pow! He had a kid. Happened just like that.
Sometimes the things we learn, Milo noted, don’t help us very much.
Sometimes Milo learned simple things that were sort of like poetry.
He was ten years old, and his gramma taught him how to take care of plants.
“You get a rock,” she told him, shuffling around her greenhouse, “and you put it in the dirt beside where the plant sprouts up. And when you go to water the plant, you pour the water over the rock instead of straight into the soil. That way the water sprinkles gently all around inside the pot and doesn’t kick up the soil and disturb the roots.”
“You water the rock,” said Milo.
“You water the rock,” said Gramma.