Doors Close, Windows Open

The Shape of Things

"For why should the thirst for knowledge be aroused, only to be disappointed and punished?"  Edwin Abbott

What began as a soft scratching at the bedroom door became a pounding. She was nothing, if not insistent. "OK, Amber, I hear you! I'm up!" I checked the clock, 7:31 a.m. The sun had been up for over an hour, so she'd been patient long enough. Wednesday morning; I didn't have to work today so it would have been nice to sleep in, but Amber had grown accustomed to our morning walks. Now that we had a routine, she'd be hard pressed to let me linger in bed.  Amber was mom's Cocker Spaniel poodle mix, or "cockapoo" who looked more cocker than poo. "To keep you from goin' looney out there by ya-self" a coworker had said as she presented the puppy to my stunned mother at her retirement party five years ago. The last thing mom had wanted was "another responsibility." Despite her initial reluctance, the puppy carved a spot in Mom's heart and life, and the two had grown thick as thieves.

Somewhere outside, I heard a dull clank-clank-clanking. I got up and opened door. Happy dog bounded in, and after the morning licking and frolicking ritual, she let me get dressed. As I walked out toward the kitchen, the clanking got louder. I followed the sound out to the yard. Mr. McGuire was hammering steel posts into the earth. The old fence lay in a heap. It looked like he was replacing the whole darned thing, and he'd obviously been working quite a while.

"Good morning sweetie," Mom said, as she strode past me with a cup of coffee. I didn't know what smelled better, the fresh brew or the wafting scent of her favorite cologne.

"Oh, hi mom. For me?" I asked, but knew better. The coffee was in one of her good cups.

"No, this one's for Jim. You can pour yourself a cup, there's a pot in the kitchen." She walked past me out to the yard, all smiles as she handed a sweaty, beaming Mr. James McGuire a hot cup of fresh coffee. Neither of them noticed when Amber and I slipped away for a walk.

I'd finished Flatland last night. What an odd little book! Though it was short, it had not been a fast read. The first half described life in a two-dimensional world called Flatland, as written by A. Square, a four-sided citizen of that odd little world. The inhabitants were two-dimensional characters whose rank and position in society were determined by the number of lines their bodies contained. Perfectly formed squares (the group to which our fictitious author belonged), meaning four equal lines, characterized the professional class. Other geometric shapes also shared A. Square's two-dimensional world.

For example, there were two types of triangles. True equilaterals, with three equal sides, represented respectable Tradesmen. Isosceles triangles, with two equal sides and one short base, were considered social servants, such as police and soldiers, who could use their sharp and pointy angles as weapons. Irregularly shapes were considered a threat to society and done away with in some way or another. Pentagons represented the physician and gentleman class. Hexagons marked beginning ranks of nobility; beyond hexagons, began Polygons and the higher ranks of nobility. The more sides, the higher one's social standing. Circles represented the highest level of evolution and constituted the ruling and priest class. For all but the triangles, each generation added a side to evolve one-step higher than their fathers.

A Flatlander moved his progeny up the social hierarchy by honorably fulfilling duties according to station in life. Thus, a square could produce Polygons who, in turn, could produce Hexagons and so forth. This pattern would continue until eventually a shape had so many sides that it became a Circle. While this pattern held true for male flatlanders, not so for females. Women were straight lines, indicating no rank, intelligence, or status in life. While males could progress into increasingly higher social strata in each succeeding generation, females could never hope to advance their lot in life. Something about that irked me, until I thought more about the time in which this book had been written, and I wondered about the hidden message Abbott may have tried to convey through this satire.

Flatland had been published in England, during the early 1880's. This time period was marked by class distinctions and social rights abuses. One only had to read Charles Dickens to gain insight to the trials and tribulations of England's lower echelons during the Victorian industrial age. Child labor was common, and lower strata workers were malnourished and uneducated. They worked for twelve hours a day, six days a week, in dark, poorly ventilated, unhealthy factories. Both the life expectancy and the physical size of the working-class poor were considerably shorter than that of the middle and upper classes. It was these sad and ragged working class conditions that gave rise to Frederick Engels and Karl Marx's works. Flatland may have been an attempt to call out the social and class distinction of that time.

Charles Darwin had died in 1882, after turning creationism on its head. A leader of scientific revolution in his time, even he championed the idea that women were inferior to men. He had reasoned that men evolved as superior because their survival depended on the use of thought, reason, imagination, or manual dexterity. Women, according to Darwin, had not been under the same pressure. Their survival depended on finding suitable mates to ensure the continuity of their genetics. Thus, the skills they needed in capturing their prey, the All Splendid Man, depended more on wiles and games, with emphasis on sentimentality and emotional fluidity, than on intelligence or reasoning. To the scientific thinkers of that era, it was an unquestionable fact that men had evolved as superior to women. One only had to look at the achievements in poetry, painting, sculpture, music, science, and philosophy to see that it was men, not women, who had advanced the species.

Of course, Darwin didn't come up with "women are inferior" ideology in a vacuum. Even the famous French physician Broca staunchly argued for that women were lesser thinkers because women's brain weighed, on average, about fifteen percent less than men's. Their logic was men were smarter because their brains were bigger. That didn't factor body and brain size in terms of proportions and yet, governed thinking about women in that time.

So it was in these socio-political times that Edwin Abbott, a distinguished mathematician, teacher, and clergyman had written this book. He had originally written it for his own amusement, never intending to publish as a serious work. I sensed that his real communication lay beneath the surface. This book reminder me of Gulliver's Travels. But what messages lay within?

"How does any of this Flatland stuff pertain to the question of why we are here?" I asked Amber, who took my question as invitation to play fetch. She dropped her stick at my feet, and looked up expectantly. I let her off the leash, knowing it was unlikely that a car would drive by, and threw the stick as far as I could. She went bouncing after it, stubbed tail held high. What a great life: find stick, chase stick, bring stick back, make human throw stick, and start over. Lather, rinse, repeat.

We turned the corner and headed toward the home stretch. A car drove up behind us, so I snapped the leash back on her halter and let her tug me along. Part two of the book had focused on A. Square's travels and revelations in other dimensions. His first adventure took him to Lineland, a one-dimensional world in which the inhabitants lived... well, on a straight line. Their only movement could go to the left or right (east to west), but not forward and backward (north and south) as could the two-dimensional Flatlander. Despite Mr. Square's attempts to reason with Lineland's monarch, he could not convince the Line King that space was anything more than unilateral movement. The experience in Lineland prepared A. Square for his visit from a three-dimensional Sphere.

At first, he could not fathom the "up-down" movement the Sphere described. Having exhausted all attempts to reason with the square, the Sphere lifted the square up and showed him a topical view of Flatland. The square felt he had been shown a great Wisdom and couldn't wait to spread news of his new knowledge, "upward, not northward."  However, this Outer Sphere had visited other inhabitants of Flatland many years ago. These earlier Flatlanders had also wanted to spread the good news of other dimensions. Knowing that this heresy was possible, the circular Priest class had enacted a decree that would either kill or imprison any Flatlander who tried to turn the heads of society with false claims of any world beyond their two-dimensions. The Square kept his Great Insight to himself as long as possible, but eventually, found himself telling others. He was imprisoned, and it was during his incarceration that he supposedly wrote about his adventures in multiple dimensions.

The clank-clank-clanking got louder with each step bringing us home. Amber pulled harder on the leash, prodding me to hurry. Even though we'd only been gone about thirty minutes, she was eager be with our mommy. I had given myself until tomorrow, at noon, to decide if I should drop the class. If I felt inspired to write the paper tonight, I'd stick with this quirky course.