Once there was a learned arcanist. He knew all of sympathy and sygaldry and alchemy. He had ten dozen names tucked neatly into his head, spoke eight languages, and had exemplary penmanship. Really, the only thing that kept him from being a master was poor timing and a certain lack of social grace.
So this fellow went chasing the wind for a while, hoping to find his fortune out in the wide world. And while he was on the road to Tinuë, he came to a lake he needed to cross.
Luckily, there was an Edema boatman who offered to ferry him to the other side. The arcanist, seeing the trip would take several hours, tried to start a conversation.
"What do you think," he asked the boatman, "about Teccam's theory of energy as an elemental substance rather than a material property?"
The boatman replied he'd never thought on it at all. What's more, he had no plans to.
"Surely your education included Teccam's Theophany?" the arcanist asked.
"I never had what you might call an education, y'honor," the boatman said. "And I wouldn't know this Teccam of yours if he showed up selling needles to m'wife."
Curious, the arcanist asked a few questions and the Edema admitted he didn't know who Feltemi Reis was, or what a gearwin did. The arcanist continued for a long hour, first out of curiosity, then with dismay. The final straw came when he discovered the boatman couldn’t even read or write.
"Really sir," the arcanist said, appalled. "It is every man's job to improve himself. A man without the benefits of education is hardly more than an animal."
Well, as you can guess, the conversation didn't go very far after that. They rode for the next hour in a tense silence, but just as the far shore was coming into sight a storm blew up. Waves started to lash the little boat, making the timbers creak and groan.
The Edema took a hard look at the clouds and said, "It'll be true bad in five minutes, then sommat worse afore it clears. This boat of mine won't hold together through it all. We're gonnta have to swim the last little bit." And with this the ferryman takes off his shirt and begins to tie it around his waist.
"But I don’t know how to swim," says the arcanist.
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Paraphrased from The Wise Man's Fear by Patrick Rothfuss