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

review.
The sight of a line of battle of twenty thousand Isosceles
suddenly facing about, and exchanging the sombre black of their bases
for the orange of the two sides including their acute angle; the
militia of the Equilateral Triangles tricoloured in red, white, and
blue; the mauve, ultra-marine, gamboge, and burnt umber of the Square
artillerymen rapidly rotating near their vermillion guns; the dashing
and flashing of the five-coloured and six-coloured Pentagons and
Hexagons careering across the field in their offices of surgeons,
geometricians and aides-de-camp -- all these may well have been
sufficient to render credible the famous story how an illustrious
Circle, overcome by the artistic beauty of the forces under his
command, threw aside his marshal's baton and his royal crown,
exclaiming that he henceforth exchanged them for the artist's pencil.
How great and glorious the sensuous development of these days must
have been is in part indicated by the very language and vocabulary of
the period. The commonest utterances of the commonest citizens in the
time of the Colour Revolt seem to have been suffused with a richer
tinge of word or thought; and to that era we are even now indebted for
our finest poetry and for whatever rhythm still remains in the more
scientific utterance of those modern days.


* * *


SECTION 9. -- Of the Universal Colour Bill

But meanwhile the intellectual Arts were fast decaying.
The Art of Sight Recognition, being no longer needed, was no
longer practised; and the studies of Geometry, Statics, Kinetics, and
other kindred subjects, came soon to be considered superfluous, and
feel into disrespect and neglect even at our University. The inferior
Art of Feeling speedly experienced the same fate at our Elementary
Schools. Then the Isosceles classes, asserting that the Specimens
were no longer used nor needed, and refusing to pay the customary
tribute from the Criminal classes to the service of Education, waxed
daily more numerous and more insolent on the strength of their
immunity from the old burden which had formerly exercised the twofold
wholesome effect of at once taming their brutal nature and thinning
their excessive numbers.
Year by year the Soldiers and Artisans began more vehemently to
assert -- and with increasing truth -- that there was no great
difference between them and the very highest class of Polygons, now
that they were raised to an equality with the latter, and enabled to
grapple with all the difficulties and solve all the problems of life,
whether Statical or Kinetical, by the simple process of Colour
Recognition. Not content with the natural neglect into which Sight
Recognition was falling, they began boldly to demand the legal
prohibition of all "monopolizing and aristocratic Arts" and the