Blue Bamboo: Tales by Dazai Osamu Read Free Page A

rapid change takes place, then the present is, indeed, a transitional period to end all transitional periods.”
    This was of no use whatsoever—least of all as a story. The youngest son was nonetheless positively triumphant, convinced that he was beginning to hit his stride.
    “Things have become extremely complicated. We are now awash in a deluge of theorems, and mathematics as we know it has reached a dead end. It has been reduced to a science of mere rote memorization. And the one man who at this crucial juncture has dared to stand up and proclaim freedom for mathematics is none other than our elderly professor. He’s a great man. Had he become a detective, he undoubtedly would have solved even the most difficult and bizarre case after nothing more than a quick stroll through the scene of the crime. That’s how brilliant he is. At any rate, as Cantor himself has put it,”—here we go again—“freedom is the very essence of mathematics. This is certainly true.
    “Our word for ‘freedom’— jiyusei —was coined as a translation of the German Freiheit . But it’s said that the Japanese word was originally used in a strictly political sense and may not be an exact equivalent. Freiheit is a simple concept that means ‘not enslaved,’ ‘not subject to restraint.’ Examples of things that are not frei are to be found in any number of familiar places... so many, in fact, that it’s difficult to choose a single illustration. But take our telephone number, for example, which, as you all know, is four eight two three. How do we write it? With a comma between the first and second integers. Four comma eight two three. Now, if we were to write it with a slash, as they do in Paris—four eight slash two three—one could see the logic, but this custom of separating each group of three digits with a comma is nothing less than a form of slavery. Our elderly professor is making every effort to smash such corrupt conventions. He is a great man. Poincaré tells us that the only thing worthy of our love is truth, and I heartily agree. To grasp the truth in a concise and direct manner is the highest of human endeavors. There is nothing superior to it.”
    So, what about the story? The other brothers and sisters were by now exchanging disconcerted looks, but the youngest son remained oblivious to them as he plowed ahead with his wobbly thesis.
    “To enter the realm of empty academic theory is to run the risk of digressing from the point, but if I might ask you to bear with me for a moment, it so happens that I am currently engaged in the study of mathematical analysis, and since it is rather fresh in my mind, I should like to present a certain problem inherent in this field as an example of what I’m trying to say. These days it has become customary for treatments of mathematical analysis to begin with a discussion of the theory of sets—a questionable tendency in and of itself. Tradition, it would seem, can inspire in people an almost religious faith, and this sort of blind dogmatism has even begun to infiltrate the world of mathematics. It must be driven out at all costs. And that is precisely what our elderly professor has taken it upon himself to do—to rise to the battle against tradition.”
    The youngest son was growing noticeably excited. Everyone else was bored to tears, but he had roused himself to a righteous fervor worthy of his elderly professor.
    “Let’s examine the case of absolute convergence. In the past, ‘absolute convergence’ meant that a sum was conditionally constant irrespective of order or sequence—the operative word being ‘conditionally.’ What it means nowadays, on the other hand, is simply that progression series of absolute value must converge. It’s said that if progression series converge and progression series of absolute value do not converge, one can change the order of the terms to make them tend to an arbitrary limit, so it turns out that... that they converge anyway, so... so