Section 14. How I vainly tried to explain the nature of Flatland
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Thinking it was time for me to burst the Monarch’s bubble of fantasy and bring him back to the realm of common sense, I decided I was going to try to get him to understand some of the real truth of the World, the way things worked in Flatland.
So I started with this: “Your Royal Highness, how do you tell the shape and position of your subjects? I noticed through my sense of Sight, before I entered your Kingdom, that some of your people are Lines, and others are Points, and that some of the Lines are longer—”
He interrupted me with, “You are talking nonsense. You must have been hallucinating, because it’s impossible to see the difference between a Line and a Point, you can only tell them apart by hearing, which is also how the exact measurement is taken. Look at me and behold – I am a Line, the longest in Lineland, over six inches in Space –”
“In Length,” I corrected.
“Idiot!” he snapped, “Space is Length! Interrupt me again and this conversation is over!”
I apologized, but he was still angry, and continue scornfully, “Since you refuse to listen to reason, you will hear with your own ears how the sound of my two voices allows my Wives to calculate my exact measurements! One of my Wives is to the North, the other to the South. They are both six thousand miles, seventy yards, two feet, and eight inches away from me. Now, listen while I call to them.”
He chirped loudly, and then casually continued, “My wives will hear one of my two voices first, and then the other. By counting the time between hearing the first voice and the second, they will be able to calculate the distance between my two mouths.
“One is 6.457 inches away from the other, which tells them that my total shape is 6.457 inches. But don’t pretend to think that they perform this calculation every single time they hear me speak! They knew my shape before we were even married. But they could recalculate it at any time just as easily. By this same method, I can tell the shape of any of my Male subjects through the sense of sound.”
I asked, “But what if a Man pretended to have a Woman’s voice by using just one of his mouths, or disguised his Southern voice so that you couldn’t recognize it as an echo of the Northern one? Wouldn’t this cause a lot of problems? Don’t you have any way to make sure people are telling the truth, by Feeling one another?”
Obviously, this was a very stupid question, because Feeling wouldn’t have worked in Lineland, but I asked it just to annoy the Monarch, which worked perfectly.
“What?!” He cried in horror, “What do you mean?”
“Feel, touch, come into contact,” I replied.
“If when you say ‘feeling’,” said the King, “You mean getting so close to someone that there is no more space left between you, you must know, Stranger, that this is a crime punishable by death. And it’s obvious why: Women are so fragile that they would probably be shattered by the slightest ‘touch’, as you call it, and since it’s impossible to tell Women from Men using only sight, it is illegal for anyone to ‘touch’ anyone else.
“And why would anyone want to do such a dangerous and illegal thing as ‘touching’ when simply listening is so much easier, safer and accurate?
“And as to the idea that anyone could successfully lie about their shape, that’s impossible, because your Voice is the whole essence of your Being, and cannot be changed as easily as you pretend.
“But lets imagine that I did have the power to pass through solid objects, and I could go through all the billions of my subjects without hurting anyone, verifying their shape and distance by the sense of ‘feeling’. How much time and energy would I have to waste with such a clumsy and inaccurate method! All it takes right now is a single moment of song, and I know everything there is to know about every being in Lineland. Listen, just listen!”
And then he paused and listened, as if delighted, to the many noises made by his people, which to me just sounded like a bunch of tiny crickets, the kind you might find on the fictional island of Lilliput from Gulliver’s Travels.
“Truly,” I said, “Your sense of hearing does help you a lot, and fills in the gaps of your problems. But allow me to point out that your life must be incredibly boring. You can see nothing but a Point! You can’t even see a Straight Line! You don’t even know what a Straight Line is! You miss out on all the things we enjoy in Flatland! I think it would be better to be entirely blind than to see so little!
“I’ll admit that your hearing is more advanced than mine, because the music of Lineland that you enjoy so much sounds like basic chirping to me, but at least I can see the difference between a Line and a Point, and I’ll prove it!
“Right before I entered your Kingdom, I saw you dancing back and forth from right to left, with seven Men and a Woman on your left side, and eight Men and two Women on your right. Aren’t I correct?”
“You’re right as far as the numbers and sexes go,” said the King, “But I don’t understand what you mean by ‘right’ and ‘left’. And I know you’re lying about seeing these things. How could you possibly see the Line – the inside – of any Man? You probably heard this information, and then hallucinated that you saw it instead of hearing it. But tell me what the words ‘left’ and ‘right’ mean. I assume it’s your way of saying North and South?”
“No,” I said, “Besides the movement from North to South, there is another way to move, called from right to left.”
“Then please demonstrate how to move from left to right.” he said.
“I can’t show you that,” I said, “Unless you could step out of your Line entirely.”
“Step out of my Line? Do you mean out of the world? Out of Space itself?” he asked.
“Well, yes,” I said, “or at least your version of the World. What you call Space is not the entirety of it. Real Space is a Plane, but you think it’s only a Line.”
“If you can’t show me what this movement from left to right looks like, then please describe it to me in words.” he said.
“If you can’t even tell your right side from your left, I don’t think anything I can say will make it clearer to you.” I said, “But surely I don’t need to explain something as basic as that.”
“I have absolutely no idea what you’re taking about.” he said.
“Alas! How am I supposed to explain it to you then?” I asked, “When you move forward, doesn’t it ever occur to you that you could go a different way? By going in the direction your side is facing? Instead of always moving forward or backward, haven’t you ever wanted to move to the side?”
The King said, “No, never. And what do you mean? How can a man’s insides face in any direction? How can a man move in the direction of his insides?”
I said, “Well, since words can’t explain it, I’ll try showing you with actions. I will slowly move out of Lineland, in the direction I’m trying to explain to you. Okay?”
Then I began to slowly move my body back out of Lineland.
As long as any part of me was still in his view, the King kept saying, “I still see you. I still see you. You’re not moving.”
[Image description start: A diagram showing a blue line, labeled “Lineland”. There is a short black line labeled “the King” the left side of the image, and in the center is a Square intersecting Lineland with just his lower angle. The rest of his body outside Lineland is covered in horizontal lines, showing which parts would intersecting Lineland at a time, labeled, “My body just before I disappeared”. Image description end.]
But then I was out of Lineland, out of his Line of Sight, and he shouted, “She is vanished – she is dead!”
“I’m not dead,” I said, “I just moved out of Lineland, the Straight Line that you call Space. I am in the real Space, where I can see everything. I can see your Line, or side, which you call your insides, and I can also see the Men and Women on the North and South sides of you. I’ll now describe to you their order, their size, and the distance between them.”
This took a while, but when I was done, I cried triumphantly, “Are you convinced now?” Then I reentered Lineland, in the same spot I had held before.
But the Monarch replied, “If you were a Man of sense – though, considering the fact that you have only one voice, I know you are a Woman – but if you had any sense at all, you would listen to reason.
“You expect me to believe that there is another Line besides the one I can see and hear, and another range of motion besides the one I can move in. But when I ask you to describe these to me in words, or show me them, instead of moving, you just play some magic trick to make yourself invisible, and instead of actually describing the world you claim exists, you just tell me the numbers and sizes of about forty of my subjects, which is information that is readily available to everyone here at all times, down to the smallest child! Could anything be more unbelievable or audacious? Just admit that you are lying, or else get out of my kingdom!”
Enraged by not only his continued failure to understand the most basic things, but also his instance that I wasn’t a Man, I retorted angrily, “You self-absorbed fool! You think you’re the most perfect thing in existence, but you’re really the most flawed and idiotic! You claim to be able to see, but all you see is nothing but a Point! You’re so proud of your ability to calculate a Straight Line, but I can actually see Straight Lines, and calculate the existence of Angles, Triangles, Squares, Pentagons, Hexagons, and even Circles!
“Why should I waste any more breath? I am the final evolution of your unevolved form. You are a Line, but I am a Line of Lines, known to my country as a Square, and even I, who am so superior to you, am nothing next to the great nobles of Flatland, which is where I have come from, to visit you in the hope of making you less ignorant!”
When he heard my words, the King gave a threatening cry and charged at me as though to pierce me through the diagonal, and at the same time a roar arose from the billions of his subjects, a war-cry so loud and violent that it rivaled the volume of a hundred thousand charging Isosceles and the artillery guns of a thousand Pentagons.
Frozen in place, I couldn’t speak or move to avoid this horrifying death sentence. And still the noise grew louder and louder, and the King rushed closer, until suddenly I awoke from this nightmare to hear the breakfast-bell calling me back to the reality of Flatland.
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