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

confiding tradesman! Let the advocates of a falsely called
Philanthropy plead as they may for the abrogation of the Irregular
Penal Laws, I for my part have never known an Irregular who was not
also what Nature evidently intended him to be -- a hypocrite, a
misanthropist, and, up to the limits of his power, a perpetrator of
all manner of mischief.
Not that I should be disposed to recommend (at present) the
extreme measures adopted by some States, where an infant whose angle
deviates by half a degree from the correct angularity is summarily
destroyed at birth. Some of our highest and ablest men, men of real
genius, have during their earliest days laboured under deviations as
great as, or even greater than forty-five minutes: and the loss of
their precious lives would have been an irreparable injury to the
State. The art of healing also has achieved some of its most glorious
triumphs in the compressions, extensions, trepannings, colligations,
and other surgical or diaetetic operations by which Irregularity has
been partly or wholly cured. Advocating therefore a _Via Media,_ I
would lay down no fixed or absolute line of demarcation; but at the
period when the frame is just beginning to set, and when the Medical
Board has reported that recovery is improbably, I would suggest that
the Irregular offspring be painlessly and mercifully consumed.


* * *


SECTION 8. -- Of the Ancient Practice of Painting

If my Readers have followed me with any attention up to this
point, they will not be surprised to hear that life is somewhat dull
in Flatland. I do not, of course, mean that there are not battles,
conspiracies, tumults, factions, and all those other phenomena which
are supposed to make History interesting; nor would I deny that the
strange mixture of the problems of life and the problems of
Mathematics, continually inducing conjecture and giving an opportunity
of immediate verification, imparts to our existence a zest which you
in Spaceland can hardly comprehend. I speak now from the aesthetic
and artistic point of view when I say that life with us is dull;
aesthetically and artistically, very dull indeed.
How can it be otherwise, when all one's prospect, all one's
landscapes, historical pieces, portraits, flowers, still life, are
nothing but a single line, with no varieties except degrees of
brightness and obscurity?
It was not always thus. Colour, if Tradition speaks the truth,
once for the space of half a dozen centuries or more, threw a
transient splendour over the lives of our ancestors in the remotest
ages. Some private individual -- a Pentagon whose name is variously
reported -- having casually discovered the constituents of the simpler
colours and a rudimentary method of painting, is said to have begun by
decorating first his house, then his slaves, then his Father, his