This is how the world changes: We loosen the stranglehold of our givens, bend and stretch our minds to imagine what was once unimaginable, test our theories against reality, and emerge with vision expanded into new dimensions of truth. “What we see, we see,” Adrienne Rich wrote in her beautiful ode to women’s unheralded heroism in science and to science itself as a supreme tool of changing our seeing and understanding what we cannot see.
Nearly a century earlier, the Victorian schoolmaster and theologian Edwin Abbott Abbott (December 20, 1838–October 12, 1926) explored this subject from a different angle in his brilliant 1884 allegorical novella Flatland: A Romance in Many Dimensions, newly issued in a lovely slip-case edition. In this classic masterwork of perspective, Abbott examines the science of multiple spatial dimensions while satirizing the absurdity of truth by consensus and extending a subtle invitation to consider how what we take as our givens limits our grasp of reality, presenting us with a false view of the world warped by our way of looking at it.
The story is narrated by a protagonist named A. Square, a native of Flatland — a world whose geometric denizens only live and see in two dimensions. But the square has a transformative experience that renders him “the sole possessor of the truths of Space.” On the eve of a new year, he has a hallucinatory vision of journeying to a faraway place called Lineland, populated by “lustrous points” who see him…
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