Excerpts From: Edwin Abbott Abbott. “Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Illustrated).” Apple Books.
Commentary
The book Flatland is often interpreted as being true about three dimensional space, but of course, that’s but child’s play once on encounters calculus.
A more mature, subtle take on Flatland says, “If we’re not careful, we’ll be flattened (potential-wise) to the timeline that can only see possibility as ‘we are each of us all right.’”
That we are all right is of course an absurd proposition and skews the soul toward practices that reduce confidence… spur doubt!
That “we are all right” leads to crippling doubt is a paradox and attests to lack of “depth” of experience. Flatness. A timeline shift to the position farthest away from actual impetus.
This is why not only sense-making but meaning-making as well are collective phenomena.
Keywords
humanity, humility, sphere, cube, dimension, imagination, mystery
Hence I am absolutely destitute of converts, and, for aught that I can see, the millennial Revelation has been made to me for nothing. Prometheus up in Spaceland was bound for bringing down fire for mortals, but I—poor Flatland Prometheus—lie here in prison for bringing down nothing to my countrymen. 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.That is the hope of my brighter moments. Alas, it is not always so. Heavily weighs on me at times the burdensome reflection that I cannot honestly say I am confident as to the exact shape of the once-seen, oft-regretted Cube; and in my nightly visions the mysterious precept, "Upward, not Northward", haunts me like a soul-devouring Sphinx. It is part of the martyrdom which I endure for the cause of the Truth that there are seasons of mental weakness, when Cubes and Spheres flit away into the background of scarce-possible existences; when the Land of Three Dimensions seems almost as visionary as the Land of One or None; nay, when even this hard wall that bars me from my freedom, these very tablets on which I am writing, and all the substantial realities of Flatland itself, appear no better than the offspring of a diseased imagination, or the baseless fabric of a dream.
