December 01, 2004

The old man finally drove himself mad, after years of the world attempting nobly to do so, by trying to write a book. ‘Mathematicians should never try to write books’ was the unspoken lesson at his funeral, where the events leading up to his death were painted as the last passionate struggles of a man on the forefront of mathematics and literature, when in reality he had convinced himself that one could write a book by starting out with a word and then simply adding to it every other possible word that would make sense after it. After spending a year trying to picture the first page in his mind, he started inventing a much stronger type of paper that could withstand the mammoth opening that he so vulgarly intended to place on it, and when his relatives were dividing up his inheritance, no one knew what to do with all the rolls and rolls of blank pages.

December 1, 2004 04:14 PM