Latest / Daily Classic Science Fiction Books / 02 - Flatland- A Romance of Many Dimensions - Edwin Abbott Abbott
Transcript
- Part one, Section four concerning the women. If our highly pointed triangles of the soldier class are formidable, it may be readily inferred that far more formidable are our women. For if a soldier is a wedge, a woman is a needle, being, so to speak, all point at least at the two extremities. Add to this the power of making herself practically invisible at will, and you will perceive that a female in flatland is a creature by no means to be trifled with. But here perhaps some of my younger readers may ask how a woman in flatland can make herself invisible? This ought, I think to be apparent without any explanation. However, a few words will make it clear to the most unreflecting. Place a needle on a table, Then, with your eye on the level of the table, look at its sideways, and you see the whole length of it. But look at it endways, and you see nothing but a point. It has become practically invisible. Just so is it with one of our women. When her side is turned towards us, we see her as a straight line, when the end containing her eye or mouth. For with us these two organs are identical is the part that meets our eye, then we see nothing but a highly lustrous point. But when the back is presented to our view, then, being only sublustrous, and indeed almost as dim as an inanimate object, her hinder extremity serves her as a kind of invisible cap. The dangers to which we are exposed from our women must now be manifest to the meanest capacity in spaceland. If even the angle of a respectable triangle in the middle class is not without its dangers. If to run against a working man involves a gash, if collision with an officer of the military class necessitates a serious wound, if a mere touch from the vertex of a private soldier brings with it danger of death, what can it be to run against a woman except absolute and immediate destruction? And when a woman is invisible, or visible only as a dim, sublustrous point, how difficult must it be even for the most cautious always to avoid collision. Many are the enactments made at different times in the different states of flatland in order to minimize this peril, and in the southern and less temperate climates where the force of gravitation is greater and human beings more liable to casual and involuntary motions. The laws concerning women are naturally much more stringent, but a general view of the code may be obtained from the following summary. One. Every house shall have one entrance in the eastern side for the use of females only, by which all females shall enter in a becoming and respectful manner, and not by the men's or western door. Footnote. When I was in Spaceland, I understood that some of your priestly circles have in the same way a separate entrance for villagers, farmers, and teachers of board schools Spectator, September eighteen eighty four, Page one, two five five, that they may approach in a becoming and respectful manner. End of footnote. Two. No female shall walk in any public place without continually keeping up her peace cry, under penalty of death. Three. Any female duly certified to be suffering from Saint Vitus's dance fits, chronic cold accompanied by violence, sneezing, or any disease necessitating involuntary motions, shall be instantly destroyed. In some of the states, there is an additional law forbidding females under penalty of death, from walking or standing in any public place without moving their backs constantly from right to left, so as to indicate their presence to those behind them. Others obliged to woman, when traveling, to be followed by one of her sons or servants, or by her husband. Others confine women altogether to their houses, except during the religious festivals. But it has been found by the wisest of our circles or statesmen, that the multiplication of restricttions on females tends not only to the debilitation and diminution of the race, but also to the increase of domestic murders, to such an extent that a state loses more than it gains by a too prohibitive code. For whenever the temper of the women is thus exasperated by confinement at home or hampering regulations abroad, they are apt to vent their spleen upon their husbands and children. And in the less temperate climates, the whole male population of a village has been sometimes destroyed in one or two hours of simultaneous female outbreak. Hence, the three laws mentioned above suffice for the better regulated states, and may be accepted as a rough exemplification of our female code. After all, our principal safeguard is found not in legislature but in the interests of the women themselves. For although they can inflict instantaneous death by a retrograde movement, yet unless they can at once disengage their stinging extremity from the struggling body of their victim, their own frail bodies are liable to be shattered. The power of fashion is also on our side. I pointed out that in some less civilized states, no female is suffered to stand in any public place without swaying her back from right to left. This practice has been universal among ladies of any pretensions to breeding in all well governed states as far back as the memory of figures can reach. It is considered a disgrace to any state that legislation should have to enforce what ought to be and is in every respectable female a natural instinct. The rhythmical and if I may say so, well modulated undulation of the back in our ladies of circular rank is envied and imitated by the wife of a common equilateral who can achieve nothing beyond a mere monotonous swing like the ticking of a pendulum, and the regular tick of the equilateral is no less admired and copied by the wife of the progressive and aspiring isosceles. In the females of whose family, no back motion of any kind has become as yet a necessity of life. Hence, in every family of position and consideration, back motion is as prevalent as time itself, and the husbands and sons in these households enjoy immunity, at least from invisible attacks. Not that it must be for a moment supposed that our women are destitute of affection, but unfortunately the passion of the moment predominates in the frail sex over every other consideration. This is of course a necessity arising from their unfortunate conformation, for as they have no pretensions to an angle, being inferior in this respect to the very lowest of the isosceles, they are consequently wholly devoid of brain power, and have neither reflection, judgment, nor forethought, and hardly any memory. Hence, in their fits of fury they remember no claims and recognize no distinctions. 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. Obviously, then a woman is not to be irritated as long as she is in a position where she can turn round. When you have them in their apartments, which are constructed with a view to denying them that power, you can say and do what you like, for they are then wholly impotent for mischief, and will not remember a few minutes. Hence the incident for which they may be at this moment threatening you with death, nor the promises which you may have found it necessary to make in order to pacify their fury. On the whole, we get on pretty smoothly in our domestic relations, except in the lower strata of the military classes. There, the want of tact and discretion on the part of the husbands produces at times indescribable disasters. Relying too much on the offensive weapons of their acute angles instead of the defensive organs of good sense and seasonal simulations, these reckless creatures too often neglect the prescribed construction of the women's apartments, or irritate their wives by ill advised expressions out of doors, which they refuse immediately to retract. Moreover, a blunt and stolid regard for literal truth indisposes them to make those lavish promises by which the more judicious circle can in a moment pacify his consort. The result is massacre, not, however, without its advantages, as it eliminates the more brutal and troublesome of the isosceles, and by many of our circles, the destructiveness of the thinner sex is regarded as one among many providential arrangements for suppressing redundant population and nipping revolution in the bud. Yet, even in our best regulated and most approximate circular families, I cannot say that the ideal of family life is so high as with you in spaceland. There is peace in so far as the absence of slaughter may be called by that name. But there is necessarily little harmony of tastes or pursuits, and the cautious wisdom of the circles has ensured safety at the cost of domestic comfort in every circular or polygonal household. It has been a habit from time immemorial, and has now become a kind of instinct among the women of our higher classes, that the mothers and daughters should constantly keep their eyes and mouths towards their husband and his male friends. And for a lady in a family of distinction to turn her back upon her husband would be regarded as a kind of portent involving loss of status. But as I shall soon show, this custom, though it has the advantage of safety, is not without its disadvantages. In the house of the working man or respectable tradesman, where the wife is allowed to turn her back upon her husband while pursuing her household avocations, there are at least intervals of quiet when the wife is neither seen nor heard except for the humming sound of the continuous peace cry. But in the homes of the upper classes there is too often no peace. There. The voluble mouth and bright penetrating eye are ever directed towards the master of the household, and light itself is not more persistent than the stream of feminine discourse. The tact and skill which suffice to avert a woman's sting are unequal to the task of stopping a woman's mind. And as the wife has absolutely nothing to say and absolutely no constraint of wit, sense, or conscience to prevent her from saying it. Not a few cynics have been found to aver that they prefer the danger of the death dealing but inaudible sting to the safe sonorousness of a woman's other end to my readers in Spaceland, the condition of our women may seem truly deplorable, and so indeed it is. A male of the lowest type of the Isosceles may look forward to some improvement of his angle and to the ultimate elevation of the whole of his degraded caste. But no woman can entertain such hopes for her sex. Once a woman, always a woman is a decree of nature, and the very laws of evolution seem suspended in her disfavor. Yet at least we can admire the wise pre arrangement which has ordained that as they have no hopes, so they shall have no memory to recall, and no forethought to anticipate the miseries and humiliations which are at once a necessity of their existence and the basis of the Constitution of Flatland. Section five of our methods of recognizing one another, You, who are blessed with shade as well as light. You who are gifted with two eyes, endowed with a knowledge of perspective, and charmed with the enjoyment of various colors, You who can actually see an angle and contemplate the complete circumference of a circle in the happy region of the three dimensions. How shall I make clear to you the extreme difficulty which we in Flatland it excl experience in recognizing one another's configurations. Recall what I told you above. All beings in Flatland, animate or inanimate, no matter what their form, present to our view the same or nearly the same appearance viz. That of a straight line. How then, can one be distinguished from another where all appear the same? The answer is threefold. The first means of recognition is the sense of hearing, which with us is far more highly developed than with you, and which enables us not only to distinguish by the voice our personal friends, but even to discriminate between different classes, at least so far as concerned the three lowest orders, the equilateral, the square, and the pentagon. For of the isosceles I take no account. But as we ascend in the social scale, the process of discriminating and being discriminated by hearing increases in difficulty, partly because voices are assimilated, partly because the faculty of voice discrimination is a plebeian virtue, not much developed among the aristocracy, and wherever there is any danger of imposture, we cannot trust to this method. Amongst our lowest orders, the vocal organs are developed to a degree more than correspondent with those of hearing, so that an isosceles can easily feign the voice of a polygon, and with some training, that of a circle himself. A second method is therefore more commonly resorted to. Feeling is among our women and lower classes. About our upper classes, I shall speak presently the principal test of reais recognition at all events between strangers, and when the question is not as to the individual, but as to the class. What therefore introduction is among the higher classes in spaceland, that the process of feeling is with us. Permit me to ask you to feel and be felt by my friend, mister so and so. Is still among the more old fashioned of our country, gentlemen, in districts remote from towns, the customary formula for a flatland introduction, but in the towns, and among men of business, the words be felt by are omitted, and the sentence is abbreviated to let me ask you to feel, mister so and so. Although it is assumed, of course, that the feeling is to be reciprocal among our still more modern and dashing young gentlemen, who are extremely averse to superfluous effort and supremely indifferent to the purity of their native life language, the formula is still further curtailed by the use of to feel in a technical sense, meaning to recommend for the purposes of feeling at being felt, and at this moment the slang of polite or fast society in the upper classes sanctions such a barbarism, as mister Smith, permit me to feel you, mister Jones. Let not, my reader, however, suppose that feeling is with us the tedious process, that it would be with you, or that we find it necessary to feel right round all the sides of every individual before we determine the class to which he belongs. Long practice and training, begun in the schools and continued in the experience of daily life, enable us to discriminate at once by the sense of touch between the angles of an equal sided triangle, square and pentagon. And I need not say that the brainless vertex of an acute angled eye soosely is obvious to the dullest touch. It is therefore not necessary as a rule, to do more than feel a single angle of any individual. And this, once ascertained, tells us the class of the person whom we are addressing, unless indeed he belongs to the higher sections of the nobility. There the difficulty is much greater. Even a master of Arts in our University of Wentbridge has been known to confuse a ten sided with a twelve sided polygon. And there is hardly a doctor of science in or out of that famous university who could pretend to decide promptly and unhesitatingly between a twenty sided and a twenty four sided member of the aristocracy. Those of my readers who recall the extracts I gave above from the Legislative Code concerning Women, will readily perceive that the process of introduction by contact requires some care and discretion, Otherwise the angles might inflict on the unwary feeler irreparable injury. It is essential for the safety of the feeler that the felt should stand perfectly still. A start, a fidgety shifting of the position, Yes, even a violent sneeze has been known before now to prove fatal to the incautious, and to nip in the bud many a promising friendship. Especially, is this true among the lower classes of the triangles. With them the eye is situated so far from their vertex that they can scarcely take cognizance of what goes on at that extremity of their frame. They are moreover of a rough, coarse nature, not sensitive to the delicate touch of the highly organized polygon. What wonder, then, if an involuntary toss of the head, as e'er now deprived the state of a valuable life. I have heard that my excellent grandfather, one of the least irregular of his unhappy Isosceles class, who indeed obtained shortly before his decease four out of seven votes from the Sanitary and Social Board for passing him into the class of the equal sided, often deplored with a tear in his venerable eye, A miscarriage of this kind which had occurred to his great great great grandfather, a respectable working man with an angle or brain of fifty nine degrees thirty minutes. According to his account, my unfortunate ancestor, being afflicted with rheumatism, and in the act of being felt by a polygon, by one sudden start, accidentally transfixed the great man through the diagonal, and thereby, partly in consequence of his long imprisonment and degradation, and partly because of the moral shock which pervaded the whole of my ancestors relations, throw back our family a degree and a half in their ascent towards better things. The result was that in the next generation the family brain was registered at only fifty eight degrees, and not till the lapse of five generations was the lost ground recovered, the full sixty degrees attained, and the ascent from the Isosceles finally achieved. And all this series of calamities from one little accident in the process of feeling. At this point, I think I hear some of my better educated readers exclaim, how could you in flatland know anything about angles and degrees or minutes. We can see an angle, because we in the region of space can see two straight lines inclined to one another. But you, who can see nothing but one straight line at a time, or at all events, only a number of bits of straight lines, all in one straight line. How can you ever discern any angle, and much less register angles of different sizes. I answer that though we cannot see angles, we can infer them, and this with great precision. Our sense of touch, stimulated by necessity and developed by long training, enables us to distinguish angles far more accurately than your sense of sight when unaided by rule or measure of angles. Nor must I omit to explain that we have great natural helps. It is with us a law of nature that the brain of the Isosceles class shall begin at half a degree or thirty minutes, and shall increase, if it increases at all, by half a degree, in every generation, until the goal of sixty degrees is reached, when the condition of serfdom is quitted, and the freeman enters the class of regulars. Consequently, Nature herself supplies us with an ascending scale or alphabet of angles for half a degree up to sixty degrees, specimens of which are placed in every elementary school throughout the land. Owing to occasional retrogressions to still more frequent moral and intellectual stagnation, and to the extraordinary fecundity of the criminal and vagabond classes. There is always a vast superfluity of individuals of the half degree and single degree class, and a fair abundance of specimens up to ten degrees. These are absolutely destitute of civic rights, and a great number of them, not having even intelligence enough for the purposes of warfare, are devoted by the state to the service of education, fettered immovably so as to remove all possibility of danger. They are placed in the class rooms of our infant schools, and there they are utilized by the Board of Education for the purpose of imparting to the offspring of the middle classes that tact and intelligence of which these wretched creatures themselves are utterly devoid. In some states the specimens are occasionally fed and suffered to exist for several years, but in the more temperate and better regulated regions, it is found, in the long run more advantageous for the educational interests of the young to dispense with food and to renew the specimens every month, which is about the average duration of the foodless existence of the criminal class. In the cheaper schools. What is gained by the longer existence of the specimens is lost, partly in the expenditure for food, and partly in the diminished accuracy of the angles, which are impaired after a few weeks of constant feeling. Nor must we forget to add, in enumerting the advantages of the more expensive system, that it tends, though slightly yet perceptibly, to the diminution of the redundant isosceles population, an object which every statesman in Flatland constantly keeps in view. On the whole. Therefore, although I am not ignorant that in many popularly elected school boards there is a reaction in favor of the cheap system, as it is called, I am myself disposed to think that this is one of the many cases in which expense is the truest economy. But I must not allow questions of school board politics to divert me from my subject. Enough has been said, I trust to show that recognition by feeling is not so tedious or indecisive a process as might have been supposed, and it is obviously more trustworthy than recognition by hearing. Still, there remain, as has been pointed out above, the injection that this method is not without danger. For this reason, many in the middle and lower classes, and all without exception in the polygonal and circular orders, prefer a third method, the description of which shall be reserved for the next section. End of Part one, Section five