I.

But at the age of eleven he suddenly raised his head and began to speak.

The teachers, male and female, did not always understand the meaning of his questions. “How is it that each thing has a left side and a right side?” That two hands could be at once identical and opposite, when he thought it over, seemed altogether disconcerting. The schoolmistress laughed along with the students. Remouald looked at the floor, his face a deep red.

His favourite subject at the time was geometry; the lessons plunged him into unsettling cogitations. He wished to comprehend why Pythagoras’s theorem, which was explained on the blackboard with numbers and figures that came out of one’s head, applied as well to the wooden frames that held up the roofs of houses, if the textbooks were to be believed. The schoolmaster impatiently repeated the demonstration, which Remouald had very well understood. That is not what he wanted to know. We develop laws in our heads, we create an entire abstract, ideal, mathematical world, and in reality things are in every way like those we have imagined: through what wondrous operation did this come about? The teacher settled the matter by saying it was necessarily so. Remouald left the classroom alarmed by that adverb.

- Gaétan Soucy. trans Lazer Lederhendler. The Immaculate Conception.