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“I remember bread and butter, but I don’t know which one goes on top. I know pencil and pen-knife and bed, but I have entirely forgotten the word for maternal uncle. I remember plow, but what in the world will I say to all these great men about a plow? I pray that this cup may pass from me.”

Then he disintegrated in one abject mass of terror. Several minutes went by.

But when he emerged from the room he was a different man entirely. Erect, alive, intense, queerly handsome, and now in formal attire, he mounted with the sure grace of a panther to the speaker’s platform. Once only he glanced at the nineteen-point outline of his address. As there is no point in keeping it a secret, it was as follows: 1. Cepheid and Cerium—How Long Is a Yardstick? 2. Double Trouble—Is Ours a Binary Universe? 3. Cerebrum and Cortex—the Mathematics of Melancholia. 4. Microphysics and Megacyclic Polyneums. 5. Ego, No, Hemeis—the Personality of the Subconscious. 6. Linear Convexity and Lateral Intransigence. 7. Betelgeuse Betrayed—the Myth of Magnitude. 8. Mu-Meson, the Secret of Metamorphosis. 9. Theogony and Tremor—the Mathematics of Seismology. 10. Planck’s Constant and Agnesi’s Variable. 11. Dien-cephalon and Di-Gamma—Unconscionable Thoughts about Consciousness. 12. Inverse Squares and the Quintesimal Radicals. 13. The Chain of Error in the Lineal B Translation. 14. Skepticism—the Humor of the Humorless. 15. Ogive and Volute—Thoughts on Celestial Curviture. 16. Conic Sections—Small Pieces of Infinity. 17. Eschatology—Medium Thoughts about the End. 18. Hypo-polarity and Cosmic Hysteresis. 19. The Invisible Quadratic, or This is All Simpler than You Think.