After his beloved left him for another, the Professor took leave of his duties and locked himself away in his apartment where he spent long hours measuring the ambit of his loss.

Eventually, the Professor concluded that only with an iron will and the application of pure reason could he ever overcome his sorrow. He asked himself, What was her beauty but a thrumming of my optic nerves? What was her scent but the secretions of her skin? In this methodical way, he was able to reduce his beloved to her constituent parts and, so reduced, erase her piece by piece from his affections until none remained to trouble him.

For the rest of his life, the Professor continued to cultivate his disinterest in all things immaterial— friendship, love, desire. So successful were his efforts that decades later, as he lay dying, alone and unmourned, his last thoughts were not of the woman he had once loved but of the triumph he had achieved over himself, a triumph that the Professor clung to as his heart, at last, was stilled.