Introduction
and
Annotations:
In 1884 a headmaster of a
London school
pseudononymous wrote this georgeous little booklet. It seems to be a
razorsharp,
bitter, revealing social critic satire packed in a careful elaborate
metaphor,
comparable for instance with "Candide" by Voltaire, "Gargantua and
Pantagruel"
by Rabelias and "Gullivers Travels" by Swift.
But it is more!
In a normal satire
describing
abuses in
society, class contrasts, lust of power, ly and deceit, exploitation,
the
gap between poor and rich, vanity and shortsightedness, the writers all
get bogged down in cynism, for they do not see a way out of this valley
of tears not having an eschatology.
How different and hopeful is
this
Gospel
of the Three Dimensions!
Apparently Flatland seems a
description
of Abbott's own Victorian era. A society people are living in, chained
up in their classes, their prejudices en blinded by their
shortsightedness,
moving in the illusion they live in the only thinkable world,
comparable
with the world Plato describes in his Allegory of the Cave. In Flatland
the inhabitants live the life predestined by their descents, as it
happens
everywere in every culture. They do not live but their life is led,
determined
and limited by "self made" rules, tradition, requirements and values,
prejudices
and convictions, keeping everybody at the place he is assigned to. In
1964
Herbert Marcuse wrote "One Dimensional Man" .There was a wrinkling in
the
pound of selfcomplacency, and everybody proceeded to the order of the
day
again, staying as one dimensional as before, living and dying in his
own
Flatland.
Only he who has loosed
himself,
placing
himself out of the structure and the system, so out of the galling
bounds
of society is able to look over the madness in society. The Flatlander
only having the courage to follow the Sphere can become like the
Sphere,
understanding all. "Each person is at each moment capable of
remembering
all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is
happening everywhere in the universe." Aldous Huxley wrote in "The
Doors
of Perception" (www.mescaline.com/huxley.htm)
and in the Gospel of Thomas (logion 2) you can read: "Jesus said: He
who
seeks, let him not cease seeking until: finds; and when he finds he
will
be troubled, and if he is troubled, he will be amazed, and he will
reign
over the All."
Jesus merely was a quite
common
Sphere
showing the way out, the way to freedom.
That is the message and the
prophetical
drift of Flatland.
As Edwin Abbott complains in
the
end of
the story:
"Yet I exist in the
hope
that these
memoirs, in some manner, I know not how, may find their way to the
minds
of humanity in Some Dimension, and may stir up a race of rebels who
shall
refuse to be confined to limited Dimensionality"
And what happened until
now
with Flatland?
Mathematicians threw
themselfs
into the
packing of the message, just as theologians did with the Gospels. In
their
own Flatland, in their own Universities of Wentbridge, they endless
dispute
with many sharp witted arguments on the Unimaginable, the Fourth
Dimension
and God, all coming on the same thing. And yet all Cubes share the same
fate of that miserable Square, ignored, branded as heretics and locked
up in mental homes. And still all those beautiful small Spheres being
born
always and everywhere in Flatland during whole history of men undergo
the
same tragic fate. Compressed and disformed into Two Dimensionals and
doomed
to play the bizarre game in this nowadays Flatland.
Links
to
online text of
Flatland:
www.alcyone.com/max/lit/flatland/
www.geom.uiuc.edu/~banchoff/FLATLAND/
http://abbott.thefreelibrary.com/