Pythagoras' nightmare

HOLDEN, JONATHAN, PYTHAGORAS' NIGHTMARE, Carolina Quarterly, 26:2 (1974:Spring) p.77 VARA JONATHAN HOLDEN PYTHAGORAS’ NIGHTMARE Once all his calculations came out like peas. You could pop them whole from the pod, perfect spheres. And they were sweet. The number two tasted the way deep fields taste after rain. You could take the trees apart, find godlike shapes if you didn’t look too hard, which is why I feel sorry for Pythagoras: he tried to take a pure square apart, he was tinkering around too much. One hard look at the diagonal, and it was too late: the quality of light had already changed. It lent the wind forbidden possibilities, the clouds this odd, this brooding weight: for the diagonal was the square root of Two, and what Two was made of— this hard, sweet pea—what all these leaves, these animals and clouds, the sun, even these ugly dreams he'd been having recently at night were made of, would not add up. The harder you tried to add them up, the finer they became, the faster they sifted through your fingers, the incommensurable parts of everything.