I review all I know, but can synthesize no meaning. When I doze, the Fact, the certain accomplished calamity, wakes me roughly like a brutal nurse. I see it crouching inflexibly in a corner of the ceiling. It comes down in geometrical diagonal like lightning. It says, I remain, I AM, I shall never cease to be: your memory will grow a deathly glaze: you will forget, you will fade out, but I cannot be undone. Thus every quarter hour it puts the taste of death in my mouth, and shows me, but not gently, how I go whoring after oblivion.
Nothing to do with nature, unless you count human nature.
He is unworthy of the name of man who is ignorant of the fact that the diagonal of a square is incommensurable with its side.
At many levels, Perl is a 'diagonal' language.