Oh, Ennis, oh God Almighty, Ennis. What's the hell's got into you these last few weeks? Oh, Jesus wept, what am I going to do with you? Major Muir wrung his hands.
Prior to seeing him and meeting him, and hearing him speak, I had conjured up a picture of him in my mind, which actual contact with him proved to be an illusion. I had conceived of him […] as being tall, commanding, and as the advance notices of him, a sliver-tongued orator. I found him, however, to be the opposite of my mental picture; short, squat, unpretentious […].
The proofs rely on geometric structure of the action function ℒ_𝓉(x,y) induced by H, and the identification of the absolute subminimality of u with convexity of the Hamilton-Jacobi flow t↦Tᵗᵘ(x).