#section 05

[Table of Contents]

You, who are blessed with the ability to perceive Shading as well as Light, whose people are gifted with not one, but two eyes, who understand perspective, who get to enjoy all shades of Color without thinking about it, you who can actually See an angle, and see the complete circumference of a Circle from your happy, elevated position in the Third Dimension without a single speck of effort—How can I make you understand how difficult it is for us in Flatland to recognize each other?

Remember what I already explained to you earlier? All things in Flatland, alive or inanimate, no matter what their shape, appear to be, to our view the same as a Straight Line. So then how can we tell one shape from another, when all shapes look the same?

The answer is threefold.

The first way of recognizing different shapes is the sense of Hearing, which with us is much more highly developed with us than it is with you in Spaceland, and not only lets us recognize the voices of our friends, but even to tell which class someone belongs, at least as far as the three lower classes – the Equilateral, Square, and Pentagon – go. As for the Isosceles, well, there’s no telling.

As we rise in social standing it becomes harder and harder to tell people’s classes apart by their voice, partly because the higher classes all speak in similar ways, and partly because using someone accent to judge their class is a poor man’s skill that is looked down upon by the Aristocracy.

And if there’s any danger of offending someone more important than us, we can’t trust this skill, because among the lowest classes, the vocal organs are more strongly developed, so that an Isosceles can easily fake the accent of a Polygon, and, with some training, even a Circle himself. So a second method is more commonly used.

Feeling is, among our Women and lower classes – (I’ll explain shortly about our higher classes) – the main test of Recognition in most cases between strangers, and also when the question is not to the individual’s identity, but his class.

As a result, what you in Spaceland call a “formal introduction” is the equivalent of “Feeling” with us.

For our more old-fashioned gentlemen who live out in the country, “Permit me to ask you to feel and be felt by my friend Mr. Smith”, is still the go-to phrase.

But in the towns, and among businessmen, the words “be felt by” are cut out, and the sentence is shortened to, “Let me ask you to feel Mr. Smith”, and it is just assumed that the “feeling” will go both ways.

Among our younger, more modern, and dashing young gentlemen, who refuse to expend any extra effort than necessary, and don’t care at all about protecting the sanctity of their language, the phrase is shortened even more, using the words “to feel” as a shortcut for “to recommend for the purpose of feeling and being felt”.

At the time this book was written, this “slang” of the newest generation allows such disgraceful barbarism as the sentence, “Mr. Smith, permit me to feel Mr. Jones”, to exist.

But please, my Readers, don’t assume that “Feeling” for us is as awkward and tedious as it would for you, or that we have to go all the way around the person, feeling all his sides, before we can figure out what class he belongs to.

Years of practice and training, started in school and continued in daily life, allow us to immediately tell apart the angles of an Equal-sided Triangle, Square, or Pentagon at a single touch. And I don’t think I need to explain how the brainless vertex of an acute-angled Isosceles is obvious even to the dullest touch.

That is why, as a general rule, we don’t need to feel more than a single angle of an individual, and this by itself can tell us the class this person belongs to, unless he belongs to one of the higher sections of the nobility, where things become much more difficult.

Even a Master of Arts from our University of Wentbridge has gotten a Ten-sided and Twelve-sided Polygon confused, and there is no Doctor of Science, in or out of that university who would pretend to know, without hesitation, the difference between a Twenty-sided (or Icosagon) and a Twenty-four sided (or Icositetragon) member of the Aristocracy.

The Readers who have been paying attention and remember what I said earlier about our Women’s Code should quickly understand that the process of Feeling requires serious caution and self-control, otherwise the angles of the one being Felt might seriously injure the Feeler.

It is essential for the safety of the Feeler that the Felt should stand completely still. A single twitch, any fidgeting, and yes, even something as simple as a violent sneeze can prove fatal. Things like this have ended many promises friendships before they could even begin.

This is especially true with the lower classes of Isosceles. Their eyes are positioned so far from their sharpest point that they can barely see what’s happening at their most dangerous end. These Triangles are also literally insensitive, and can barely feel the much more refined touch of a highly bred Polygon. So no one can really be surprised if a sudden toss of the head deprives the State of a valuable life!

I’ve heard that my honorable Grandfather – (one of the least Irregular of his unhappy Isosceles class, who obtained, shortly before his death, four out of seven votes from the Sanitary and Social Board to let him be certified as an Equal-Sided Triangle) –often bemoaned, with a tear in his venerable eye, an accident of the kind I’ve just described to you, which happened to his great-great-great-Grandfather, a respectable Working Man with an angle, or brain, of 59 degrees 30 minutes.

According to this story, my unfortunate great-great-great-great-great grandfather, who was suffering from rheumatism, and while being felt by a Polygon, with one sudden, unintentional movement, he accidentally transfixed the Great Man in a horrific stabbing straight through the diagonal.

Half because of his long suffering in prison, and half because of the moral shock that swept through all of my ancestor’s relatives, our family’s angle was thrown back by a degree and a half, cutting off their rise to higher status.

This resulted in the next generation of the family brain being measured at only 58 degrees, and it wasn’t until five whole generations passed that the lost ground was recovered, and the full 60 degrees obtained, finally lifting my family out of the class of Isosceles.

And to think this whole series of calamities all came from one little accident in the process of Feeling.

And I think at this point I can hear some of my readers exclaiming, “How can you Flatlanders know anything about angles, degrees, or minutes? We can see an angle from Spaceland, because we can see two straight lines connecting to form an angle, but you Flatlanders can only ever see one line, or just a few pieces of different lines in a bigger line – how can you hope to measure any angle, let alone measure angles of different sizes?”

My answer is that while we can’t see angles, we can infer them, and do so with great accuracy. Our sense of touch, trained through constant use, lets us tell angles apart far more accurately than you can with the naked eye. We have many Natural Advantages that shouldn’t be forgotten.

It is a Law of Nature that the brain of the Isosceles class begins at half a degree of angle, or thirty minutes, and if it increases, it will do so by half a degree for every generation, until the goal of 60 degrees is reached, when the newest, freeman generation leaves behind the condition of slavery, and joins the class of the Regulars.

This means that Nature herself gives us the tools we need, in the form of an ascending scale, or alphabet, of angles for every half a degree, all the way to 60 degrees, giving us all the examples we need, specimens of which are placed in every Elementary School throughout the land.

Due to occasional slip-backs like the kind my family suffered, as well as frequent moral and intellectual stagnation, not to mention the extraordinary ability of the Criminal and Vagabond Classes to breed, there is always a vast pool of individuals with an angle of half a degree or a single degree, and a fair abundance of Specimens up to 10 degrees.

These are absolutely destitute of civic rights; and many of them are too stupid to even be useful in warfare, so they are given from the State and to the schools, to be used for education.

Shackled so tightly they cannot move in any way to remove all possibility of danger, they are placed in our kindergarten classrooms, and are used by the Board of Education to teach the young Equilateral Triangles that have been adopted away from their biological parents the proper tact and intelligence that the wretched Isosceles who produced them are completely lacking in.

In some Countries, these chained Specimens are sometimes given food and water, and as a result, are allowed to suffer through life for several years after their capture; but in better-run areas, we know that the educational interests for the children are better served with saving the cost of the food, and simply getting new Specimens every month – which is about how long a member of the Criminal Class can last before starving to death.

The cheaper schools which choose to prolong the life of the Specimen lose in the long run by the cost of the food and water, and partly in the lessened accuracy of the Specimen’s angles, which, after a few weeks of constant “Feeling”, become damaged.

And when we think of the advantages of the more expensive system of constantly replacing Specimens, lets not forget that it helps, however slightly, to lower the numbers of the Isosceles population, which is a goal that every statesman in Flatland constantly keeps in mind.

This is why I think (even though many of our popularly elected School Boards prefer the cheap system) that the more expensive system is, in this case, the best use of the money.

But I shouldn’t let the politics of School Boards distract me from my real subject. I’ve said enough, I hope, to show that Recognition by Feeling isn’t as tedious or confusing a process as you might assume, and it is also obviously more trustworthy than Recognition by Hearing.

But many argue, rightly, that this method can be very dangerous.