Not that I couldnt understand what we were supposed to be doing. But I wasted a lot of time waiting to find out what these, literally mundane, constructions with pencil, ruler, protractor & compass had to do with the magic-sounding world of true points
These, our teacher had mysteriously warned us at the beginning of lesson 1, had no dimension, they literally did not exist
Things got worse when we got to circles. A locus of points we learned. I thought locus meant place.
Now I had always thought of points as circular things, like the dot you make with your pencil. So it had seemed logical to think of a true, dimensionless point as a circular dot shrunk to the point of invisibility. A circle, therefore must be but a single point magnified up, a kind of uber point, a representation of infinity in the opposite direction, the direction of large
But a place of points?
Does that mean like the home of points? Or a collection of points? Say like one of those diagrams they use to test for colour blindness?
Why one should want to mess around with lines which touched only one of them was beyond me
Light dawned eventually round about theorem 63 when I realised that the circles we were dealing with were just the same sort of thing as the triangles & lines we drew. The proofs were just the same ploughing through if this equals this & that equals that, then one thing leads to another
Just another swizz, really
The magic had died
To see the world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And Eternity in an hour
William Blake
