The Smartest Man in the World

Jake Barnes had been in school about fifty years when it happened, they say. He was always an excellent student, serious—you know the type—a real scholar.
He listened to I don’t know how many thousand lectures on every field of human knowledge, from the world
S foremost authorities, and understood them all.
He read I don’t know how many hundred thousand books from the world’s most magnificent and venerable libraries. He spoke with I don’t know how many hundreds of fellow scholars for—well, that was just it: it was his life.

Into Jake Barnes had flowed the input of the entire sum of human experience. He had so listened, studied, watched, absorbed, questioned--.

Then one day it happened.

Jake started to smile. He began in the middle of a seminar to speak, and all his fellows began to listen.

He spoke of things old and things new, things changing and things unchanging; things foreign and things remote. Jake Barnes spoke with the tongues of men and angels, and continued to speak.

More came to listen. Then more, then the foremost authorities in every field, as Jake continued to speak and speak, and they took notes, all of them, because Jake spoke faster and faster, as if the pressure to say all he knew was so welling in him—as if his mind was connecting complexities and relationships almost faster than he could communicate them.

Faster and faster spoke Jake Barnes. Faster and faster did they all try to record his wisdom, until it became a physical impossibility to keep up. His words turned to sounds incomprehensible, frenzied, hysterical to those present.

And finally the end came. Jake giggled, then smiled and simply said, “Goo-goo-Ma-ma-da-da-want-play?” He never said another word and died several years later.