“That is it?” the pilgrim asked his guide, the priest. “This is what I came for?”

It was said to be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. So, too, would it have been difficult for a rich man to come to this point. Impossible, really. The same was true for most poor men. But an extremely rich man had options, and this man had spent freely, passing from very rich to very poor in the process.

“That depends on what you came for,” the priest told him, the last of the man’s money tucked away inside his robes.

It was a large sum, by his reckoning, but a small one compared to what had been expended in the search that led the seeker to him in the first place. He had not been seeking the priest, the temple, or the book originally… he had not known of them. Half his fortune had been used up seeking answers that no one could seem to give him. He’d chased after hints and rumors of wise men, fortune tellers, and oracles, and though some had produced what surely qualified as signs and wonders none had been able to help him.

He’d met a woman who knew what the next day would bring as surely as he knew it would start with a sunrise, but she hadn’t known what he needed to know. He’d met a man who could communicate with angels and said he knew all the secret names of God, but he had not been able to help. He’d seen a child who had been counting aloud backwards from four hundred million something from the moment of birth, every waking moment, taking exactly six seconds per number. The child had been no help at all.

And then, just when he’d been almost ready to give up all hope, word had reached his ears. There was a book, the word said, and this book… this book…

“Tell me,” the formerly-wealthy man said. “Tell me again.”

“Before you is the book of the never-known,” the priest said. “It holds the things that no man knows, things no man will ever know. I have told you this before.”

“And it has the answer I need?”

“I do not know that,” the priest said. “No man does. No man will.”

“It must,” the man said, staggering towards the book. “The answer must be somewhere, and it isn’t anywhere else. I’ve been looking so long. It must… it must… I know it!”

As the man’s outstretched hands drew near the book, a single shot rang out in the tiny cave. He took one more staggering step, lurching to the side, and then collapsed.

“I told you,” the priest said, putting away his gun. “No man will ever know what the book says.”

“Well, that’s an interesting question,” the young man replied. “I mean, can you?”

“Er, beg pardon?”

“Obviously you’re capable of speech,” the young man said. “We share a common language and my ears are in good working order. Unless there is something peculiar that stops you from telling secrets in general or one secret in particular, it seems like the answer would be yes, you can tell me a secret.”

“Oh, well, I suppose what I meant was, would you like to know…”

“Of course, then we’re left with a bit of a paradox,” the young man said. “So long as you know it and I don’t, we can say that a piece of information is ‘a secret’ to me. But once you’ve told it to me, the veil is ripped away and it’s a secret no longer. So can you tell me a secret? I suppose that the answer to that question really depends on at what point the secret ceases to be a secret and becomes common knowledge. Is it when you start to tell it? When you finish? The point at which I understand what it is that I’m hearing? If you tell me, and later I forget, does it become a secret again?”

“You know what? Never mind,” the old man said.