"Abbott, Edwin A - Flatland" - читать интересную книгу автора (Abbott Edwin A)

there is too often no peace. There the voluble mouth and bright
penetrating eye are ever directed toward the Master of the household;
and light itself is not more persistent than the stream of Feminine
discourse. The tact and skill which suffice to avert a Woman's sting
are unequal to the task of stopping a Woman's mouth; and as the wife
has absolutely nothing to say, and absolutely no constraint of wit,
sense, or conscience to prevent her from saying it, not a few cynics
have been found to aver that they prefer the danger of the death-
dealing but inaudible sting to the safe sonorousness of a Woman's
other end.
To my readers in Spaceland the condition of our Women may seen
truly deplorable, and so indeed it is. A Male of the lowest type of
the Isosceles may look forward to some improvement of his angle, and
to the ultimate elevation of the whole of his degraded caste; but no
Woman can entertain such opes for her sex. "Once a Woman, always a
Woman" is a Decree of Nature; and the very Laws of Evolution seem
suspended in her disfavour. Yet at least we can admire the wise
Prearrangement which has ordained that, as they have no hopes, so they
shall have no memory to recall, and no forethought to anticipate, the
miseries and humiliations which are at once a necessity of their
existence and the basis of the constitution of Flatland.


* * *


SECTION 5. -- Of our Methods of Recognizing one another

You, who are blessed with shade as well as light, you, who are
gifted with two eyes, endowed with a knowledge of perspective, and
charmed with the enjoyment of various colours, you, who can actually
_see_ an angle, and contemplate the complete circumference of a Circle
in the happy region of the Three Dimensions -- how shall I make it
clear to you the extreme difficulty which we in Flatland experience in
recognizing one another's configuration?
Recall what I told you above. All beings in Flatland, animate and
inanimate, no matter what their form, present _to our view_ the same,
or nearly the same, appearance, viz. that of a straight Line. How
then can one be distinguished from another, where all appear the same?
The answer is threefold. The first means of recognition is the
sense of hearing; which with us is far more highly developed than with
you, and which enables us not only to distinguish by the voice of our
personal friends, but even to discriminate between different clases,
at least so far as concerns the three lowest orders, the Equilateral,
the Square, and the Pentagon -- for the Isosceles I take no account.
But as we ascend the social scale, the process of discriminating and
being discriminated by hearing increases in difficulty, partly because
voices are assimilated, partly because the faculty of voice-
discrimination is a plebeian virtue not much developed among the
Aristocracy. And wherever there is any danger of imposture we cannot