Cadaeic Cadenza is a short
story written by
Michael Keith in 1996 that encodes the first 3835
digits of
pi.
I'll wait a moment for that to sink in.
This work is divided into fourteen sections:
One: A Poem (translation of Edgar Allen Poe's The Raven (see Poe, E., Near a Raven))
Two: Change
Three: Of Carrolls (translation of Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky)
Four: An Hypothesis
Five: Dreams
Six: Cadaeics
Seven: Prufrock (translation of T. S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock)
Eight: The Readiness
Nine: O Ruby Yachts (translation of one stanza of Omar Khayyam's Rubaiyat)
Ten: Clue
Eleven: William Shakespeare's Tragedy King Claudius (translation of part of Hamlet 5:1)
Twelve: The Meeting
Thirteen: Sandburg's Grass (translation of Carl Sandburg's Grass)
Finale: The Victor
Throughout most of the story, The following
constraint is present. A word of
N digits represents:
Since section twelve is the
antepenultimate (and the author likes the word),
Mike thought he'd make things interesting. The previous
constraint is removed, in place of the following:
- This section is an acrostic: The first letter of each sentence spells 'C A D A E I B F E C E ...' -- that is,
3.1415926535... where A=1, B=2, C=3, etc..
- This section is also a lipogram: It does not contain the letter 'o'.
For the
penultimate chapter, the author decided to adopt
all three constraints, at the same time giving a very passable retelling of
Carl Sandburg's poem,
Grass.
Note that 'Cadaeic' itself is also an acrostic for pi, albeit rounded up.