An Appeal to Your Mercy

It was an afternoon in early March, smack-bang in the middle of the school year, or nearly so, and Scaggs, our earnest scholar of, at the moment, geometry, had taken up his well-read text in the school library, a noble institution outfitted with a number of inviting circular wooden tables and an astounding array of lofty bookcases filled with a selection of the finest volumes available, and now peopled with Scaggs, a party of his friends settled at the table next to his—scattered with assorted papers and assignment books—and one or two pairs of Scaggs's fellow scholars, discussing quietly at various places in the room the finer points of, shall we say, middle eastern philosophy. It was a fine day, the skies above painted the most brilliant blue and ornamented with only the whitest, fluffiest clouds, as though the heavens were holding a talent show, and the remainder of the school had poured outside to enjoy the first really good weather of the season. Scaggs began to solve the very first proof of his homework, dealing with the law of cosines, and had written down only a few lines when he was rudely jerked from the land of adjacent/hypotenuse by a loud burst of laughter from the next table, accompanied by various of the cruder expressions of the English language which our friend Scaggs, being properly reverent of the great facility of language in humankind, the very great leap into civilization it represents and the importance of using it properly, was caused some pain by these interactions. He cringed from what was, in his young soul, the highest offense any human could deliver to the faculty of speech: blatantly improper grammar, insinuating turns of phrase he disliked profoundly, crass innuendos, and a general Dionysian, Epicurean attention to nothing at all; the descent of the airy nothings until they were no longer airy or even spritely but lolled obviously, impervious to disgust at its lack of substance...

Nevertheless, Scaggs, being a brave lad despite his delicate sensibilities, forged ahead in the realm of triangularity, doing his best to ignore the vagrant flagrancy of his classmates. It caused him endless distaste, but he endured it: the immediate crudity that made its ugly presence known, an ancient crusted sea monster, after every comment which a perverted mindset would interpret as in bad taste: “Oh,” they cried, gulping with thin laughter, “that is what she said!”

But Scaggs did not break down until he had made his way, stumbling over the audible tangle of his friends nearby, through the third, fourth and fifth problems and was adventuring onto the sixth, a knotty, puzzling problem involving the square root of the hypotenuse’s third cousin twice removed and the opposite and/or adjacent sides. The cousin was discovered to be away to tea with an elderly aunt, and the weight of the relations of the put-upon triangle in his proof was such that Scaggs, on the behalf of his woebegone shape, desiring only to calm its sufferings and bring home the offending relations, snapped under the dual strain. The chattering of his friends suddenly overwhelmed him; the pettiness of their affairs concerned him more than they concerned the parties actively involved.

"Don't you know," Scaggs cried in desperation, "that you are offending the very matter of my being by existing in such a fashion as you do, as though life were no more than a series of fashions to be tried with the flighty fancy of the vapid butterfly who flits from flower to flower, and the way anything serious is discarded by you with not even a glance at its character rends at my greater moral sense until I can barely stand the pain?"


"Why, Scaggs, old fellow," they exclaimed reproachfully, "you'll never have any friends, if you take that attitude towards life."