“When I was seventy-eight I discovered that my wife had been betraying me with another man for fifty-four years, so I went to St. Margaret’s Bridge and took a lovely header into the river, thereby winning the diving championship of the Metropolitan Athletic Club. Subsequently, I established a record in underwater swimming, for I stayed under water for two and a half days, whereas my nearest rival, Kankovsky, could only bear it for two minutes and nineteen and a half seconds.”
Book design junkie Will Schofield uncovers The Moral, a quirky super-short story by Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy. A shaggy-dog tale, as it turns out, but with a punchline that Robert Frost would love.
Bonus points: Frigyes Karinthy is the guy who first proposed ‘six degrees of separation,’ in his 1929 story Chains.
The Moral comes from a later Karinthy collection, which had this wonderful cover:
Yes, this IS two men in a bath week at Who2.
{ 50 Watts via Jessa Crispin }