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

drags behind his regular and respectable vertex, a parallelogram of
twelve or thirteen inches in diagonal: -- what are you to do with such
a monster sticking fast in your house door?
But I am insulting the intelligence of my Readers by accumulating
details which must be patent to everyone who enjoys the advantages of
a Residence in Spaceland. Obviously the measurements of a single
angle would no longer be sufficient under such portentous
circumstances; one's whole life would be taken up in feeling or
surveying the perimeter of one's acquaintances. Already the
difficulties of avoiding a collision in a crowd are enough to tax the
sagacity of even a well-educated Square; but if no one could calculate
the Regularity of a signle figure in the company, all would be chaos
and confusion, and the slightest panic would cause serious injuries,
or -- if there happened to be any Women or Soldiers present -- perhaps
considerable loss of life.
Expediency therefore concurs with Nature in stamping the seal of
its approval upon Regularity of conformation: nor has the Law been
backward in seconding their efforts. "Irregularity of Figure" means
with us the same as, or more than, a combination of moral obliquity
and criminality with you, and is treated accordingly. There are not
wanting, it is true, some promulgators of paradoxes who maintain that
there is no necessary connection between geometrical and moral
Irregularity. "The Irregular," they say, "is from his birth scouted
by his own parents, derided by his brothers and sisters, neglected by
the domestics, scorned and suspected by society, and excluded from all
posts of responsibility, trust, and useful activity. His every
movement is jealously watched by the police till he comes of age and
presents himself for inspection; then he is either destroyed, if he is
found to exceed the fixed margin of deviation, at an uninteresting
occupation for a miserable stipend; obliged to live and board at the
office, and to take even his vacation under close supervision; what
wonder that human nature, even in the best and purest, is embittered
and perverted by such surroundings!"
All this very plausible reasoning does not convince me, as it has
not convinced the wisest of our Statesmen, that our ancestors erred in
laying it down as an axiom of policy that the toleration of
Irregularity is incompatible with the safety of the State. Doubtless,
the life of an Irregular is hard; but the interests of the Greater
Number require that it shall be hard. If a man with a triangular frnt
and a polygonal back were allowed to exist and to propagate a still
more Irregular posterity, what would become of the arts of life? Are
the houses and doors and churches in Flatland to be altered in order
to accommodate such monsters? Are our ticket-collectors to be
required to measure every man's perimeter before they allow him to
enter a theatre, or to take his place in a lecture room? Is an
Irregular to be exempted from the militia? And if not, how is he to
be prevented from carrying desolation into the ranks of his comrades?
Again, what irresistible temptations to fraudulent impostures must
needs beset such a creature! How easy for him to enter a shop with
his polygonal front foremost, and to order goods to any extent from a