Fog

Use in the book

The explanation reverses an expectation Abbott can assume of many Spaceland readers. Fog ordinarily obscures an object, yet in Flatland a perfectly clear atmosphere would erase the brightness differences needed to distinguish its receding sides. The medium supplies information precisely because it reduces visibility unequally. The point is not that obscurity is inherently wise, but that knowledge depends on contrasts rather than undifferentiated clarity.

The measured example, comparing an object three feet away with one two feet eleven inches away, gives this principle an ordinary scale. From small gradations an experienced observer infers a configuration. The subtle information is available to a trained eye, not to sight in the abstract. Hence the phrase “Nurse of arts” is both comic extravagance and a compressed account of the conditions under which an art can develop.

The demonstration with Merchant and Physician makes the contrast useful to rank. The Triangle's sides recede sharply from the nearest vertex and lose brightness rapidly; the Pentagon's decline is gentler. Fog permits the observer to recover depth within the plane from a one-dimensional appearance. That inference remains dependent on orientation and regularity. A side presented frontally can mislead, and a moving crowd requires experience well beyond the elementary diagram.

The resource is also unevenly distributed. Fog prevails outside the torrid zones, and mastery of its evidence requires education inaccessible to many. What the narrator praises as refinement therefore has environmental and economic supports. His social hierarchy turns a cultivated response to local conditions into evidence for the superiority of the people best placed to cultivate it.

Fog accordingly offers a restrained model for reading the book. A reader needs to notice differences inside apparently uniform assertions, especially where exposition grows most confident. The analogy should not be overextended into a claim that all moral truth is deliberately veiled. Its value is more exact: something that impedes immediate visibility may furnish the very distinctions through which a careful interpreter learns to see.

Places to read

1. §6234“the result of Fog”
2. §6234“Nurse of arts”
3. §6234“Parent of sciences”
4. §6234“an unmixed evil”
5. §6234“experimental observation of comparative dimness and clearness”
6. §6234“the atmosphere is perfectly dry and transparent”

In this edition

Notes 65–6723 identify the London-fog reversal, the elevated phrase's literary resonance and the optical construction. The modern note connects “Nurse of arts” with Shakespearean praise of peace; Abbott's text bestows the phrase on Fog without identifying its source. The argument remains a fictional optical model, not a claim about the health effects of actual polluted air.

Eulogy

Formal expressions of praise. The narrator calls his exaltation of Fog eulogies, drawing attention to the celebratory rhetorical style through which an apparently unpromising physical condition becomes the foundation of arts and sciences. Printed form: eulogies (§ 6234). See Fog.

Fog

Atmospheric obscurity that progressively dims more distant portions of a figure. Unlike the obstructive fog familiar to the reader, it makes trained sight possible in Flatland by providing the tonal differences from which shape and rank can be inferred. Printed form: Fog (§ 6234). See Fog.