In Honor of Pi Day + 1

March 15, 2015
The Rule of 2.1416 

From Wikipedia –

The rule of three is a writing principle that suggests that things that come in threes are inherently funnier, more satisfying, or more effective than other numbers of things. The reader or audience of this form of text is also more likely to consume information if it is written in groups of threes. From slogans (“Go, fight, win!”) to films, many things are structured in threes. Examples include The Three Stooges, Three Little Pigs, Three Billy Goats Gruff, Goldilocks and the Three Bears and the Three Musketeers.

A series of three often creates a progression in which the tension is created, built up, and finally released. Similarly, adjectives are often grouped in threes to emphasize an idea.

The Latin phrase, "omne trium perfectum" (everything that comes in threes is perfect, or, every set of three is complete) conveys the same idea as the rule of three.

Consider the following:

               i

I like to think of the Bible as a comedy. After all, it ends with a wedding. But: the bride, New Jerusalem, has to be careful as she marches down the aisle on the arm of God the Father not to step in the charred remains of those hacked to pieces and the pieces thrown into the fire, not to soil her white pumps in sinners’ ash.

     (And why were the sinners cremated alive? To put things in the proper balance. But that’s the business of tragedy, where what goes around will come around, even if everyone has to die in the end. Comedy is never about fair.)

               ii

George Meredith
by Max Beerbohm

I am reading The Egoist to better understand a “friend” (meaning someone that has inserted herself in my life, because I need her as much as she needs another jester in her court).

     Already it’s helping. (The Egoist, not the friendship.) Meredith describes in fine, cutting detail how the egoist (Willoughby Patterne) “cultivates" himself; how he receives admiration, real or feigned or a figment of his own imaginings, with “the composure of Indian gods undergoing worship”; how he is constantly glancing (with an air of carelessness) into the “glass of his mind” to see how he, or the attitude he is striking, looks; how he can’t imagine that anyone else’s feelings can be different from what he imagines to them to be – or how their best interests might be different from what he knows they are.

     This is one of the more interesting – and irritating – characteristics of my new friend. She has known me six months; already she knows me better than I know myself. She asked me two days ago what I was thinking about when I wrote about Rocky Colavito, Saint Isidore of Seville, and the Spanish words for hair and hare. (See here.) “I wasn’t thinking. I was just making a jumble.” No, that couldn’t be right. Here is what I must have had in mind, she said and went on to explain in great detail (while I hummed "Stairway to Heaven" as loud as my inner ear could tolerate).

               iii

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