I’ve quoted Katherine Hepburn and Buckminster Fuller before but all (two) of you don’t always read everything I write and I need to repeat myself sometimes, though I have a general horror of doing so. I am struggling to be positive and well even though I am dragging my leg (and my ass). So I think of the two afore-mentioned role models.

Katherine Hepburn said there was only one answer to the question, “How are you? “and that is “Fine. I’m fine.” And then, you may remember, I quote her lines from The Philadelphia Story (1940), the play that Philip Barrie wrote for her:

“Hello! Isn’t it a fine day, though! Is everyone fine? That’s fine! My, I’m hearty.”

See, I’m trying to be hearty.

And then there’s Bucky Fuller. He said when people say they feel fine they mean they don’t feel anything, that is, nothing hurts. That’s what I would really like to feel now, nothing. I mean, that nothing hurts. Well, I guess that everyone walks around with greater or lesser degrees of pain, from a corn or callus or hangnail to something more serious and heavy-duty. You take pain off at night, if you’re lucky, and you put it on in the morning. Again, if you’re lucky, you get fleeting moments free of pain, moments when you feel “fine”. What is the time difference, exactly, between a moment and a second? I think a moment is longer.

Anyway, I am trying to be fine. It’s not so bad.

Hey, a wrap-up to yesterday’s blog about the Moebius Strip. I forgot to tell you this. Take your strip and with scissors cut down the line you drew on it without cutting it open. See what you get? Maybe you already knew that, too, but I think it’s a nice surprise every time I do it.

Not to put too fine a point on it.

Life is a Moebius Strip. I find that a comforting thought.

Cut an inch-wide strip of paper lengthwise from a sheet of copy paper. Bring the ends to meet to form a ring but give it a half twist before you seal the ends with tape. Now you have a one-dimensional paper ring with only one surface. To prove it take a pencil and run a line down the centre of the ring all the way round. You’ll never have to lift the pencil off the paper to do the other side because there is no other side. You will run into your pencil line.

You probably already know this because you have many dimensions. I was delighted when I first encountered it and still am. It’s not time in a bottle, it’s time on a piece of paper. You go forward in time, you meet the past. I find that comforting. Plus ça change and all that.

A Klein bottle is a similar marvel: a bottle with a twist in it so there is only one side. That’s possible to make, too, but a tesseract, a cube with a twist, is not because it brings in the fourth dimension which we can’t manage yet. I read a science fiction story in which a man went into a tesseract house and jumped out a window, not into the garden below, but into another place in space-time. I don’t remember anything else about him or it.

Permit a tangent here: if you retain one idea or image or emotion from something you’ve read, that makes it worth having read it. I’ll have to consider reading soon.

But not before I get on to Ursula LeGuin.

In the meantime, my damaged leg is not progressing as it should, I am gaining weight because I’m not swimming every day, I am getting tired, literally, from dragging my leg around and trying to walk normally in spite of it, and it’s February, for goodness’ sake. What better time for a trip on a Moebius Strip?