The old wizard Zare of the East poured over his tomes as he always did before resting for the night.
Yellowed pages of grimoires long since forgotten by the common folk - those who worked with their hands - crinkled softly as softer hands ran over them.
Gentle muttering seemed to meet up and depart with the ambivalent flicker of candle light caught in the breeze of the tower's high window.
It'd been years. Decades. Nearly a century. Who knew anymore.
The old wizard had prolonged his life precisely by refusing to live it. Holed up in his tower, surrounded by his books, so many bricks constituting a wall. A wall that blocked out the outside. Knowledge always staves off the outside, keeps things tightly in their places.
The wizard knew all the secrets - the secrets of the pages, that is. The secrets of saying 'no' to the outside, to the world.
'The potato grows best in such and such a dirt, with such and such water, etc.' said the farmer.
But Zare, despite his never having been a farmer, knew much better - 'that is not what the book says.'
'This kills the man' said the physician.
'But that is not what my books say' said the wizard.
'Time is an arrow that can't be restrung' said the material man.
'But the book, it says otherwise, and I have scoured through their lines from left to right - not unlike an arrow in that sense - my whole life, so surely I and my books know better. Surely because of this, I understand the outside.'
And so he went on arguing, waiting to find the right word inside his tower to finally paint the right picture of the outside.
Meanwhile, the potatoes grew and the farmers fed the masses. The physicians healed the wounds. The hunters learned from their bows.
The wizard, he grew old. By now 300 or so years had passed and the wizard, so drunk on his own presence, believed, if given the appropriate opportunity, could argue death out of taking his life.
Death reminded him kindly that nature does not argue.
