One, and One, and One…

From whiskey river:

Dogs

Many times loneliness
is someone else
an absence
then when loneliness is no longer
someone else many times
it is someone else’s dog
that you’re keeping
then when the dog disappears
and the dog’s absence
you are alone at last
and loneliness many times
is yourself
that absence
but at last it may be
that you are your own dog
hungry on the way
the one sound climbing a mountain
higher than time

(W. S. Merwin, from Writings To An Unfinished Accompaniment)

…and:

I have figured for you the distance between the horns of a dilemma, night and day, and A to Z. I have computed how far is Up, how long it takes to get Away, and what becomes of Gone. I have discovered the length of the sea serpent, the price of priceless, and the square of the hippopotamus. I know where you are when you are at Sixes and Sevens, how much Is you have to have to make an Are, and how many birds you can catch with the salt in the ocean – 187,796,132, if it would interest you.

(James Thurber, Many Moons [source])

Not from whiskey river:

Long practice and training, begun in the schools and continued in the experience of daily life, enable us [in Flatland] to discriminate at once by the sense of touch, between the angles of an equal-sided Triangle, Square, and Pentagon; and I need not say that the brainless vertex of an acute-angled Isosceles is obvious to the dullest touch. It is therefore not necessary, as a rule, to do more than feel a single angle of any individual; and this, once ascertained, tells us the class of the person whom we are addressing, unless indeed he belongs to the higher sections of the nobility. There the difficulty is much greater. Even a Master of Arts in our University of Wentbridge has been known to confuse a ten-sided with a twelve-sided Polygon; and there is hardly a Doctor of Science in or out of that famous University who could pretend to decide promptly and unhesitatingly between a twenty-sided and a twenty-four sided member of the Aristocracy.

(Edwin Abbott Abbott, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions [source])

…and:

Yes

You know how
just before we die
our whole life is supposed
to flash before our eyes?
Well, should that happen, we’d surely have,
while it is flashing,
to come to that moment when our whole life
flashes before our eyes,
and while that was happening
all over again, we’d come again
to that same moment, and so on,
which is only to say that, while I know
this might not have been good enough for Zeno
and that it’s a certainty
that death happens anyway, for that one
minute, when that thought came
and I imagined
living this life
over and over,
I said to myself, despite
all the effort, all the
pain of it,
all that has happened
and is likely to
again and again,
Yes, I thought, as I was watching you
getting ready for bed tonight,
Yes, though I knew
even then
it was crazy beyond measure,
Yes, I would, Yes,
Please, Yes.

(David Brooks [source])

If you start thinking about the ways in which the mysteries of mathematics might intersect with real life, you must prepare yourself to eventually flop, gasping, up onto the shore of M.C. Escher. Hunting for assistance on a ramble up into the mountains of the Internets won’t help (or so very recent experience tells me). You’ll be pretty much pinned there upon arrival, looking desperately this way and that — until at last you take a deep breath, blink, turn away, and open up your field of vision. But if you continue to stare…*

Bonus: …also not from whiskey river:

There Was a Young Maiden

There was a young maiden named Lizt
Whose mouth had a funny half-twist
She’d turned both her lips
Into Möbius strips…
‘Til she’s kissed you, you haven’t been kissed!

(Bob Kurosaka [source])

_________________________

* This paragraph brought to you by the folks at the Department of Overzealous Metaphor, who remind you to look both ways before crossing the railroad tracks of high concept!