Summer Reading: Flatland

Summer Reading: Flatland

I've never experienced much thought about the dim mentions until I read the book Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott. He transformed my thoughts and made me sink down to the level of the narrator, 'A Square', and see his world from his angle. This book tells the journey of a being in his two-dimensional world and his travels below and above his dimensions. The narrator describes his flat universe, as it appears to a Spaceland (3-D universe) observer and to its inhabitants. He begins by describing how the inhabitants of flat land live, how they are governed, and how they recognize each other since from a flat perspective, a square would look like a line. The book at first starts to seem like Plato's Republic when the narrator describes how the government is run. In flatland there is a higher Archie very similar to that or Plato's Republic with the women on the bottom, then the workers and army, and then nobility, priests and king. After describing his government he addresses each class which turns into a big geometry lesson. Eventually he talks about certain events that happen to his world, the one that struck me the most was the "Color Revolution." To put it simply, color changed their world because it created a revolution which over though their government and turned their world into a government very similar to a democracy. Once I got past the boring stuff above, the narrator visits a one-dimensional universe where there is only lines, he isn't greeted with much respect because the inhabitants of the one-dimensional world were rather closed minded or the author couldn't think of anything better to say about them. Then once he comes back to his world he writes about a Spaceland visitor who passes through Flatland, he appears first as a point which grows through a succession of circular slices until it reaches its full diameter, then shrinks back down to a point and disappears. Much of the rest of the book is given to the education of the narrator, who has to learn to interpret the visitor not as a two-dimensional creature growing and changing in time but rather as a being from a higher dimension, the existence of which he never previously imagined. In the process he necessarily re-evaluates all the preconceptions he had about the nature of reality, as he gradually becomes enlightened. He eventually outstrips his teacher and aspires to worlds of even