Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions
1884
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions
1884
What if everything you believed about reality was only a shadow of something larger? In Flatland, A Square, a respectable mathematician and citizen of a two-dimensional world, lives contentedly among lines and polygons, convinced he understands the universe. Women are straight lines, the lowest class. Men are polygons, their status determined by how many sides they possess: triangles for workers, squares for professionals, circles for priests. It is a rigid hierarchy of geometry, and A Square has accepted his place. Then comes a visitor from the void: a being who claims there exists an entire dimension beyond anything Square has imagined. Through encounters with the King of Lineland (a single line) and the terrifying solitude of Pointland, Square's certainties crumble. He is granted a glimpse of Spaceland, and returns home with a dangerous idea that threatens to unravel everything his society holds sacred. Abbott's 1884 masterpiece is both a razor-sharp satire of Victorian class rigidity and a genuine philosophical inquiry into how radically our perception limits our understanding of truth. The数学cal vision here anticipates modern physics by a century. What begins as clever social commentary becomes something far more unsettling: a question every generation must answer, usually badly. Who will believe you when you return from dimensions that shouldn't exist?
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“...learn this lesson, that to be self-contented is to be vile and ignorant, and that to aspire is better than to be blindly and impotently happy..””
— Edwin Abbott Abbott
“Upward, not Northward””
— Edwin Abbott Abbott
“Behold yon miserable creature. That Point is a Being like ourselves, but confined to the non-dimensional Gulf. He is himself his own World, his own Universe; of any other than himself he can form no conception; he knows not Length, nor Breadth, nor Height, for he has had no experience of them; he has no cognizance even of the number Two; nor has he a thought of Plurality, for he is himself his One and All, being really Nothing. Yet mark his perfect self-contentment, and hence learn this lesson, that to be self-contented is to be vile and ignorant, and that to aspire is better than to be blindly and impotently happy.””
— Edwin Abbott Abbott
“Either this is madness or it is Hell.” “It is neither,” calmly replied the voice of the Sphere, “it is Knowledge; it is Three Dimensions: open your eye once again and try to look steadily.””
— Edwin Abbott Abbott
“Like all great art, it defies the tyrant Time.””
— Edwin Abbott Abbott
“I have actually known a case where a Woman has exterminated her whole household, and half an hour afterwards, when her rage was over and the fragments swept away, has asked what has become of her husband and her children.””
— Edwin Abbott Abbott
“Distress not yourself if you cannot at first understand the deeper mysteries of Spaceland. By degrees they will dawn upon you.””
— Edwin Abbott Abbott
“In One Dimensions, did not a moving Point produce a Line with two terminal points?In two Dimensions, did not a moving Line produce a Square wit four terminal points?In Three Dimensions, did not a moving Square produce - did not the eyes of mine behold it - that blessed being, a Cube, with eight terminal points?And in Four Dimensions, shall not a moving Cube - alas, for Analogy, and alas for the Progress of Truth if it be not so - shall not, I say the motion of a divine Cube result in a still more divine organization with sixteen terminal points?Behold the infallible confirmation of the Series, 2, 4, 8, 16: is not this a Geometrical Progression? Is not this - if I might qupte my Lord's own words - "Strictly according to Analogy"?Again, was I not taught by my Lord that as in a Line there are two bonding points, and in a Square there are four bounding Lines, so in a Cube there must be six bounding Squares? Behold once more the confirming Series: 2, 4, 6: is not this an Arithmetical Progression? And consequently does it not of necessity follow that the more divine offspring of the divine Cube in the Land of Four Dimensions, must have eight bounding Cubes: and is not this also, as my Lord has taught me to believe, "strictly according to analogy"?””
— Edwin Abbott Abbott
“I call our world Flatland, not because we call it so, but to make its nature clearer to you, my happy readers, who are privileged to live in Space.””
— Edwin Abbott Abbott
