A long (7:30 pm to 4:52 am) and pleasant (literally refreshing) sleep last night, after a long and difficult (2 am to 7:30 pm) day yesterday; I’ll put off a report on yesterday to the end of this posting, which is instead about how that sleep came to an end, in a half-waking reverie during which a sleep-final story dream morphed into the Pythagorean Impromptu, a dream in which Danny Kaye sang the Pythagorean Theorem, in the form
The square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the two adjacent sides
(which is the version the actual Danny Kaye sang in the 1958 movie Merry Andrew, and, yes, I do remember this from 1958; I can also reproduce from memory Kaye’s
The pellet with the poison is in the vessel with the pestle, the chalice from the palace has the brew that is true
from The Court Jester of 1955, though I have trouble working the flagon with the dragon into Kaye’s final aide-memoire) — the Pythagorean Theorem, sung to the tune of Franz Schubert’s Impromptu Op. 142 No. 2, a piano piece that I happen to have played in concerts when I was a teenager, but which, more important, was actually playing (in a wonderfully warm performance by Mitsuko Uchida) on the Apple Music in my bedroom as I came out of that reverie into consciousness, when I had the sense to recognize that the words of “Pythagorean Theorem” fit reasonably well into Schubert’s melody for that Impromptu at the beginning, but that the marriage of this text and tune rapidly comes unglued, and then I was fully awake, cleaned myself up for the day, and discovered that my blood pressure had returned to excellent, after several days of anxiety-driven somewhat elevated bp, in a bounce-back that accorded with the delightful Pythagorean Impromptu dream .
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