Latest / Daily Classic Science Fiction Books / 04 - Flatland- A Romance of Many Dimensions - Edwin Abbott Abbott
Transcript
- Part one, Section eight of the Ancient Practice of painting. If my readers have followed me with any attention up to this point, they will not be surprised to hear that life is somewhat dull in flatland. I do not, of course, mean that there are not battles, conspiracies, tumults, factions, and all those other phenomena which are supposed to make history interesting. Nor would I deny that the strange mixture of the problems of life and the problems of mathematics, continually inducing conjecture and giving the opportunity of immediate verification, imparts to our existence a zest which you in spaceland can hardly comprehend. I speak now from the esthetic and artistic point of view when I say that life with us is dull, esthetically and artistically very dull. Indeed, how can it be otherwise when all one's prospect, all one's landscapes, historical pieces, portraits, flowers, still life are nothing but a single line, with no varieties except degrees of brightness and obscurity. It was not always thus color, If tradition speaks the truth, once, for the space of half a dozen centuries or more, threw a transient charm upon the lives of our ancestors. In the remotest ages, some private individual, a pentagon whose name is variously reported, having casually discovered the constituents of the simpler colors and a rudimentary method of painting, is said to have begun by decorating first his house, then his slaves, then his father, his sons and grandsons, lastly himself. The convenience, as well as the beauty of the results, commended themselves to all wherever chromatistes, For by that name, the most trustworthy authorities concur in calling him, turned his variegated frame. There he at once excited attention and attracted respect. No one now needed to feel him. No one mistook his front for his back. All his movements were readily ascertained by his neighbors, without the slightest strain on their powers of calculation. No one jostled him or failed to make way for him. His voice was saved the labor of that exhausting utterance by which we colorless squares and pentagons are often forced to proclaim our individuality when we move amid a crowd of ignorant Isosceles. The fashions spread like wildfire. Before a week was over, every square and triangle in the district had copied the example of Chromatistes, and only a few of the more conservative pentagons held out. A month or two found even the Dodecadens infected with the innovation. A year had not elapsed before the habit had spread to all but the very highest of the nobility. Needless to say, the customs soon made its way from the district of Chromatists to surrounding regions, and within two generations no one in all flatland was colorless except the women and the priests. Here, nature herself appeared to erect a barrier, and to plead against extending the innovation to these two classes. Many sidedness was almost essential as a pretext for the innovators. Distinction of sides is intended by nature to imply distinction of colours. Such was the sophism, which in those days flew from mouth to mouth, converting whole towns at a time to the new culture, but manifestly to our priests and women, is added, did not apply. The latter had only one side, and therefore plurally and pedantically speaking, no sides. The former, if at least they would assert their claim to be really and truly circles, and not mere high class polycans with an infinitely large number of infinitesimally small sides were in the habit of boasting what women confessed and deplored that they also had no sides, being blessed with a perimeter of one line, or in other words, a circumference. Hence, it came to pass that these two classes could see no force in the so called axiom about distinction of sides implying distinction of color. And when all others had succumbed to the fascinations of corporal decoration, the priests and the women alone still remained pure from the pollution of paint in moral life, sensious, anarchical, unscientific. Call them by what names you will. Yet, from an esthetic point of view, those ancient days of the color revolked with a glorious childhood of art in Flatland, a childhood alas that never ripened into manhood nor even reached the blossom of youth. To live was then in itself a delight, because living implied seeing, even at a small party, the company was a pleasure to behold the richly varied hues of the assembly in a church or theater are said to have more than once proved too distracting for our greatest teachers and actors. But most ravishing of all is said to have been the unspeakable magnificence of a military review. The sight of a line of battle of twenty thousand Isosceles suddenly facing about and exchanging the somber black of their base for the orange and purple of the two sides, including their acute angle, the militia of the equilateral triangles tricoloured in red, white and blue, the mauve, ultramarine gamboge and burnt umber of the square artillerymen rapidly rotating near their vermilion guns. The dashing and flashing of the five colored and six colored pentagons and hexagons careering across the field in their offices of surgeons, geometricians, and aide de camp. All these may well have been sufficient to render credible the famous story how an illustrious circle, overcome by the artistic beauty of the forces under his command, threw aside his marshal's battle and his royal crown, exclaiming that he henceforth exchanged them for the artist's pencil. How great and glorious the sensuous development of these days must have been is in part indicating by the very language and vocabulary of the period. The commonest utterances of the commonest citizens in the time of the colour Revolt seemed to have been suffused with a richer tinge of word or thought, And to that era we are even now indebted for our finest poetry, and for whatever rhythm still remains in the more scientific utterance of these modern days Section nine of the Universal Color Bill. But meanwhile the intellectual arts were fast decaying. The art of sight recognition, being no longer needed, was no longer practiced, and the studies of geometry, statics, kinetics, and other kindred subjects came soon to be considered superfluous and fell into distribute and neglect. Even at our university. The inferior art of feeling speedily experienced the same fate at our elementary schools. Then, the Isosceles classes, asserting that the specimens were no longer used nor needed, and refusing to pay the customary tribute from the criminal classes to the service of education, waxed daily more numerous and more insolent on the strength of their immunity from the old burden which had formerly exercised the twofold wholesome effect of at once taming their brutal nature and thinning their excessive numbers. Year by year, the soldiers and artisans began more vehemently to assert, and with increasing truth, that there was no great difference between them and the very highest class of polygons, now that they were raised to inequality with the latter, and enabled to grapple with all the difficulties and solve all the problems of life, whether statical and kinetical, by the simple process of color recognition. Not content with the natural neglect into which site recognition was falling, they began boldly to demand the legal prohibition of all monopolizing and aristocratic arts, and the consequent abolition of all endowments for the studies of site recognition, mathematics, and feeling. Soon they began to insist that inasmuch as color, which was a second nature, had destroyed the need of aristocratic distinctions, the law should follow in the same path, and that henceforth all individuals and all classes should be recognized as absolutely equal and entitled to equal rights. Finding the higher orders wavering and undecided, the leaders of the revolution advanced still further in their requirements, and at last demanded that all classes alike, the priests and the women not excepted, should do homage to colour by submitting to be painted. When it was objected that priests and women had no sides, they retorted that nature and expediency concurred in dictating that the front half of every human being, that is to say, the half containing his eye and mouth, should be distinguishable from his hinder half. They therefore brought before a General and Extraordinary Assembly of all the states of Flatland a bill proposing that in every woman, the half containing the iron mouth should be colored red and the other half green. The priests were to be painted in the same way, red being applied to that semicircle in which the eye and mouth formed the middle point, while the other or hinder semicircle was to be colored green. There was no little cunning in this proposal, which indeed emanated not from any Isosceles, for no being so degraded would have had angularity enough to appreciate, much less to devise such a model of state craft. But from an irregular circle, who, instead of being destroyed in his childhood, was reserved by a foolish indulgence to bring desolation on his country and destruction on myriads of his followers. On the one hand, the proposition was calculated to bring the women in all classes over to the side of the chromatic innovation. For by assigning to the women the same two colours as were assigned to the priests, the revolutionists thereby ensured that in certain positions, every woman would appear like a priest and be treated with corresponding respect and deference, a prospect that could not fail to attract the female sex in a mass. But by some of my readers, the possibility of the identical appearance of priests and women under the new legislation may not be recognized. If so, a word or two will make it obvious. Imagine a woman duly decorated according to the new code, with the front half i e. The half containing eye and mouth red, and with the hinder half green. Look at her from one side. Obviously you will see a straight line half read half green. Reader's note. The following paragraph makes reference to an accompanying diagram. The diagram shows a circle or priestly figure. If it is visualized as a clock face, twelve o'clock is marked M for the priest's mouth, three o'clock is marked B, and nine o'clock is marked A. The diameter AB is drawn as a dotted line and is extended outside the circle rightwards to a point which represents the position of the observer. Dotted lines are drawn downward and rightward from M towards this point, and upward and rightward from six o'clock to this point. A broad vertical line C b D is drawn between the dotted lines to indicate what the observer sees. Cbd is bright at the center and darkens sharply towards its ends. End of reader's note. Now imagine a priest whose mouth is at M, and whose front semicircle A M B is consequently colored red, while his hinder semicircle is green, so that the diameter A B divides the green from the red. If you contemplate the great man so as to have your eye in the same straight line as his dividing diameter A B, what you will see will be a straight line C b D, of which one half c B will be red, and the other b D Green. The whole line CD will be rather shorter, perhaps than that of a full sized woman, and will shade off more rapidly towards its extremities. But the identity of the colors would give you an immediate impression of identity, if not class, making you neglectful of other details. Bear in mind the decay of sight recognition which threatened society at the time of the color revolt, add to the certainty that women would speedily learn to shade off their extremities so as to imitate the circles. It must then be surely obvious to you, my dear reader, that the color bill placed us under a great danger of confounding a priest with a young woman. How attractive this prospect must have been to the frail sex may readily be imagined. They anticipated with delight the confusion that would ensue at home. They might hear political and ecclesiastical secrets intended not for them but for their husbands and brothers, and might even issue command in the name of a priestly circle out of doors. The striking combination of red and green, without addition of any other colours, would be sure to lead the common people into endless mistakes, and the women would gain whatever the circles lost in the deference of the passes by. As for the scandal that would befall the circular class if the frivolous and unseemly conduct of the women were imputed to them, and as to the consequence subversion of the constitution, the female sex could not be expected to give a thought to these considerations. Even in the households of the circles, the women were all in favor of the Universal Color Bill. The second object aimed at by the bill was the gradual demoralization of the circles themselves. In the general intellectual decay, they still preserved their pristine clearness and strength of understanding from their earliest childhood, familiarized in their circular households with the total absence of color. The nobles alone preserved the sacred art of sight recognition, with all the advantages that result from that admirable training of the intellect. Hence, up to the date of the introduction of the Universal Color Bill, the circles had not only held their own, but even increased their lead of other classes by abstinence from the popular fashion. Now, therefore, the artful irregular, whom I described above as the real author of this diabolical bill, determined at one blow to lower the status of the hierarchy by forcing them to submit to the pollution of color, and at the same time to destroy their domestic opportunities of training in the art of sight recognition, so as to enfeeble their intellects by depriving them of their pure and colorless homes. Once subjected to the chromatic taint, every parental and every childish circle would demoralize each other. Only in discerning between the father and the mother would the circular infant find problems for the exercise of its understanding, problems too often likely to be corrupted by maternal impostures, with the result of shaking the child's faith in all logical conclusions. Thus, by degrees, the intellectual luster of the priestly order would wane, and the road would then lie open for a total destruction of all aristocratic legislature and for the subversion of our privileged classes Section ten of the Suppression of the Chromatic Sedition. The agitation for the Universal Color Bill continued for three years, and up to the last moment of that period, it seemed as though anarchy were destined to triumph. A whole army of polygons, who turned out to fight as private soldiers, was utterly annihilated by a superior force of Isosceles triangles. The squares and pentagons, meanwhile, remains neutral. Worse than all, Some of the ablest circles fell a prey to conjugal fury. Infuriated by political animosity, the wives in many a noble household wearied their lords with prayers to give up their opposition to the colour bill, and some, finding their entreaties fruitless, fell on and slaughtered their innocent children and husbands, perishing themselves in the act of carnage. It is recorded that during that triennial agitation, no less than twenty three circles perished in domestic discord. Great indeed was the peril. It seemed as though the priests had no choice between submission and extermination, when suddenly the course of events was completely changed by one of those picturesque incidents which statesmen ought never to neglect, often to anticipate, and sometimes perhaps to originate, because of the absurdly disproportionate power with which they appeal to the sympathies of the populace. It happened that an Isosceles, of a low type with a brain little, if at all, above four degrees, accidentally dabbling in the colors of some tradesman whose shop he had plundered, painted himself, or caused himself to be painted, for the story varies with the twelve colors of a dodecahedron. Going into the market place, he accosted, in a feigned voice a maiden, the orphan daughter of a noble polygon, whose affection in former days he had sought in vain, and by a series of deceptions, aided on the one side by a string of lucky accidents too long to relate, and on the other by an almost inconceivable fetuity and neglect of ordinary precautions on the part of the relations of the bride, he succeeded in consummating the marriage. The unhappy girl committed suicide on discovering the fraud to which she had been subjected. When the news of this catastrophe spread from state to state, the minds of the women were violently agitated sympathy with the miserable victim, and anticipations of similar deceptions for themselves. Their sisters and their daughters made them now regard the color Bill in an entirely new aspect. Not a few openly avowed themselves converted to antagonism. The rest needed only a slight stimulus to make a similar avowal. Seizing this favorable opportunity, the circles hastily convened an extraordinary assembly of the states, and besides the usual guard of convicts, they secured the attendants of a large number of reactionary women. Amidst an unprecedented concourse, the chief circle of those days, by name pantos Hyclus, arose to find himself hissed and hooted by a hundred twenty thousand Isosceles, But he secured silence by declaring that henceforth the circles would enter on a policy of concession, yielding to the wishes of the majority, they would accept the Color Bill. The uproar being at once converted to applause, he invited Chromatistes, the leader of the sedition, into the center of the hall, to receive in the name of his followers, the submission of the hierarchy. Then followed a speech, a masterpiece of rhetoric, which occupied nearly a day in the delivery, and to which no summary can do justice with a grave appearance of impartiality. He declared that as they were now finally committing themselves to reform or innovation, it was desirable that they should take one last view of the perimeter of the whole subject its defects as well as its advantages. Gradually introducing the mention of the dangers to the tradesmen, the professional classes, and the gentlemen, he silenced the rising murmurs of the Isosceles by reminding them that in spite of all these defects, he was willing to accept the bill if it was approved by the majority, but it was manifest at all except the Isosceles were moved by his words and were either neutral or averse to the bill. Turning now to the workmen, he asserted that their interests must not be neglected, and that if they intended to accept the Color Bill, they ought at least to do so with a full view of the consequences. Many of them, he said, were on the point of being admitted to the class of the regular triangles. Others anticipated for their children a distinction they could not hope for themselves, that honorable ambition would now have to be sacrificed. With the universal adoption of colour, all distinctions would cease, Regularity would be confused with irregularity. Development would give place to retrogression. The workmen would in a few generations be degraded to the level of the military or even the convict class. Political power would be in the hands of the greatest number, that is to say, the criminal classes, who were already more numerous than the workmen, and would soon outnumber all the other classes put together. When the usual compensative laws of nature were violated, a subdued murmur of assent ran through the ranks of the artisans and chromatistes in alarm attempted to step forward and address them, but he found himself in compass with guards and forced to remain silent, while the chief circle, in a few impassioned words, made a final appeal to the women, exclaiming that if the color Bill passed, no marriage would henceforth be safe, no woman's honor secure. Fraud, deception, hypocrisy would pervade every household. Domestic bliss would share the fate of the constitution and pass to speedy perdition. Sooner than this, he cried, come death. At these words, which were the preconcerted signal for action, the Isosceles convicts fell on and chansfixed the wretched chromatistes. The regular classes, opening their ranks, made way for a band of women, who, under direction of the circles, moved back foremost invisibly and unerringly upon the unconscious soldiers. The artisans, in imitating the example of their betters, also opened their ranks. Meantime, bands of convicts occupied every entrance with an impenetrable phalanx. The battle, or rather carnage, was of short duration. Under the skillful generalship of the circles. Almost every woman's charge was fatal, and very many extracted their sting uninjured, ready for a second slaughter. But no second blow was needed. The rabble of the Isosceles did the rest of the business for themselves. Surprised, leaderless, attacked in front by invisible foes, and finding egress cut off by the convicts behind them, they at once, after their manner, lost all presence of mind and raised the cry of treachery. This sealed their fate. Every Isosceles now saw and felt a foe in every other. In half an hour, not one of that vast multitude was living, and the fragments of seven score thousand of the criminal class slain by one another's angles, attested the triumph of order. The circles delayed, not to push their victory to the uttermost the workingmen they spared, but decimated. The militia of the equilaterals was at once called out, and every triangle suspected of irregularity on reasonable grounds was destroyed by court martial. Without the formality of exact measurement by the Social Board. The homes of the military and artisan classes were inspected in a course of visitations extending through upwards of a year, and during that period every town, village and hamlet was systematically purged of that excess of the lower orders which had been brought about by the neglect to pay the tribute of criminals to the schools and university, and by the violation of other natural laws of the Constitution of Flatland. Thus the balance of classes was again restored. Needless to say that henceforth the use of colour was abolished and its possession prohibited. Even the utterance of any word denoting color except by the circles or by qualified scientific teachers, was punished by a severe penalty only at our university, in some of the very highest and most esoteric classes, which I myself have never been privileged to attend. It is understood that the sparing use of color is still sanctioned for the purpose of illustrating some of the deeper problems of mathematics. But of this I can only speak from hearsay. Elsewhere in Flatland colour is now non existent. The art of making it is known to only one living d person, the Chief Circle, for the time being, and by him it is handed down on his death bed to none but his successor. One manufactory alone produces it, and lest the secret should be betrayed, the workmen are annually consumed and fresh ones introduced. So great is the terror with which even now our aristocracy looks back to the far distant days of the agitation for the Universal Color Bill. End of Section ten.