Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions

§ 6. Of Recognition by Sight. Fog makes sight possible, because lines grow dimmer with distance and the rate at which they fade betrays their angles. With two diagrams the Square shows how a Merchant, who is an Equilateral, fades faster than a Physician, who is a Pentagon, and he admits that real cases, such as a crowd of rotating Polygons in a ball-room, defeat all but the best trained. In passing he names his Father, a Triangle, his Pentagon Sons and his two Hexagon Grandsons, and he explains that the art is taught at the University of Wentbridge, where to feel is a serious fault. The section ends on the Polygons who fail the Leaving Examination, from whom past risings drew their leaders. Some statesmen would imprison or kill them.

§ 7. Of Irregular Figures. Social life rests on regularity, since a single angle tells a figure’s class only if all its sides are equal. An Irregular is therefore treated as a criminal, watched from birth, destroyed if he exceeds the allowed deviation, or else shut away as a clerk for life. The Square sets out the reformers’ plea for mercy at length and in fair words, and then rejects it, asking how houses and theatres could be built for such monsters. He has never known an Irregular who was not a hypocrite and a mischief-maker, and the section ends with his own moderate proposal, that an Irregular child whom the doctors cannot cure be painlessly put to death. It is the darkest page of Part I.

§ 8. Of the Ancient Practice of Painting. Life in Flatland is dull to the eye, since every view is a single line, but in remote ages a Pentagon called Chromatistes learned to make colours and painted his house, his slaves, his family and himself. The fashion spread within a year to all but the highest nobles, and within two generations to all but the Women and the Priests, who claimed to have no sides to colour. For six centuries or more Flatland was a pageant. The Square, who calls the age immoral and unscientific, describes its armies in colour with open delight, and ends on the debt that Flatland’s poetry still owes to it.

§ 9. Of the Universal Colour Bill. Colour made the old arts of recognition needless, geometry decayed even at the University, and the lower orders, who no longer gave their Criminals to the schools, grew numerous and demanded equality. Their leaders brought before an extraordinary Assembly a Bill to paint every Woman and every Priest red in front and green behind. The Bill was the work of an Irregular Circle spared in childhood. With a diagram the Square shows how a Priest so painted would look like a young Woman, and the Women, he adds, were delighted. The Bill’s second aim was to corrupt the Circles’ colourless homes, where the art of sight was still kept alive. The section ends on the danger to the whole Aristocracy.

§ 10. Of the Suppression of the Chromatic Sedition. The agitation lasted three years and cost the Polygons an army and the Circles some of their ablest members to angry wives, until an Isosceles painted as a Dodecagon married a noble orphan by fraud and her suicide turned the Women against the Bill. At an extraordinary Assembly Pantocyclus feigned surrender, spoke for nearly a day, and won over every class but the soldiers before he gave the agreed signal. Convicts transfixed Chromatistes, here named as the leader of the rising although the founder of colour had lived centuries before, the Women charged unseen, and the Isosceles destroyed one another. Purges followed. Colour was abolished, and the secret of making it was left to the Chief Circle alone.

§ 11. Concerning our Priests. The Square turns to the Circles, calling all that went before mere preface to his true subject, his initiation into the mysteries of Space, and passing over the physics of his world with a shrug. The Circles direct everything and do nothing. Yet the educated know that no Circle is truly round, only a Polygon of very many sides, its shape hidden by the rule that forbids anyone to feel it. As their sides increase their fertility falls, and ambitious nobles send their infant sons to the Neo-Therapeutic Gymnasium to have their frames broken and re-set, where scarcely one in ten survives. A single success keeps the parents coming.