My version
Here is an apple. It is red and also a little bit yellow. It is ripe and fresh and juicy. It has a lot of vitamins and is good for children. This apple is perfect. It contains no worm, no disappointment. The apple is important.
Centuries ago there was a man who loved apples. He loved it when the apple trees became covered with blossoms in the spring and later when the flowers fell slowly down from the branches and lay like snow on the green grass. He loved it when the first small fruits appeared among the leaves in the summer and when in the fall they became large, beautiful and golden-red. He owned an orchard with a lot of apple trees. When the weather was nice he would sit in his orchard and think about the big World.
He thought about the World and about the Earth and about apples. When it was autumn he watched the apples fall down into the grass and he wondered why all of them fall down toward the Earth, instead of, for example, falling up toward the Moon, or just flying off in some other direction. And he wondered also why the Moon is too falling constantly and unsuccessfully toward the Earth. And he imagined that the Earth is made of many apples, and the apples on the trees fall down when they become ripe and heavy so that they can be with the other apples in the Earth. And the Moon is also made of apples and that’s why it falls toward the Earth, but the Earth also falls a little toward the Moon and they are always falling like that in circles around and around and around…
When Isaac was 44 years old he wrote a book. The book was a surprise to everyone and it changed everything and it made us know what we know today. It was about the big World and the people and the Earth and the Moon and the apples. It was about all the things that he had imagined while he sat in his apple orchard. But he couldn’t write in his book that the Earth was made of apples, because then everyone would think he was crazy. So instead he invented integral calculus and the theory of universal gravitation.
PS: Other versions welcomed.
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From The Game of the Angel
“When I was little, for a while I really wanted to be Aesop.”
”We all let go of our greatest dreams as we grow up.”
”What did you want to be when you were a child, Mr. Corelli?”
”God.”