Flatland Essay (이다인 중 1)

 

 

* 다음은 1개월 정도 사고 훈련을 받은 다인이 쓴 첫 번째 영어 에세이이다. 앞으로 두 세 번 정도 가이드에 따라 에세이를 작성해 본 후 학생 별로 다른 에세이들을 쓰게 된다. 아직 검토가 끝나지 않은 초벌 상태의 에세이임을 밝혀 둔다. 따라서 오타나 어법에 맞지 않는 표현이 들어 있을 수 있다.

 

 

Flatland: Indirect Contact with a Two Dimensional Worlds

Dain Lee (Gwiin Middle School)

Do you believe in unicorns? Most people do not, as they cannot see it in real life and there are no evidence that suggests its existence. Although people tend to believe in whatever they can see, there are also the ones who believe in invisibles. For example, though we cannot see it, the presence of oxygen has been verified through various experiments. It is now a common sense that oxygen exists. From this example, we can infer that people have faith in something that can be seen or be proved by scientific experiments. As you may have noticed, there is a serious flaw in this argument. How about god? What about people who have faith in god? “God” cannot be verified by research and is invisible. These factors had led to controversy on the presence of god and supernatural creatures. This question has been raised during the 19^th century in Britain and resulted in non-believers. The number of these people increased as time went, and many clerics became nervous. Edwin Abbott Abbott was one of these worried clerics. He wrote a scientific novel which included his religious beliefs; Flatland. This book became popular among people at that time and is still known to many people. Let’s find out who Edwin Abbott Abbott was as a person.

 

1. Edwin Abbott Abbott: who is he?

Edwin is a 19^th century deacon and a scholar. He was a headmaster of various schools like City of London School and Philological School at Marylebone. He retired at age of 50 in order to pursue is favorite work, writing. He wrote numerous books about grammar, vocabulary and Christianity. Although his works were considered as excellent, his most famous and complimented work was flatland.

 

2. Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions

Flatland is a two dimensional world inhabited with geometric shapes. Men are polygons with different number of sides and women are simple line segment. This world has hierarchy which depends on number of the sides you have; more sides represent higher ranks. The workers are equilateral triangles and the narrator (author himself) is a square and therefore a middleclass man. The highest class is circle, and being “priest”, they believe in the existence of third dimension. The story flows as the narrator sees a sphere that visited the Flatland. He does not “see” a sphere but a dot that grows and shrinks. He then accepts the idea of third dimension and starts to spread the idea. His fellow Flantlanders makes fun of this idea and eventually put him in jail until his death.

 

3. Social Elements

Abbott portrayed the state of the 19^th century Victorian era throughout Flatland. Social ranks exist with priests being a “perfect” shape as circles. Men and Women use different doors as women, being a line segment, could appear in dots. When women chose to appear as dots, they were invisible to men and therefore they could accidently stab a man to death. This describes the social states of women of the era. Women could not advance in the field of science and math and thus had to use men in order to success in those fields. Abbott also depicted the religious stage of the 1800s. People started to not believe in Christianity which resulted discomforts to priests. Abbott was a priest himself, so he was also frustrated by this happening. He tried to disseminate the existence of god by describing the god as a sphere. The sphere proved its presence by the way it is projected in the world of Flatland. However, even if the sphere represented the god in this book, it does not mean we have to believe in one. Abbott wrote Flatland with a premise; sphere exists. This was supported by sphere visiting Flatland. In order to validate the existence of god in this way, we also have to presuppose the presence of god. Therefore, Abbott’s way of explaining the existence of god is not legitimate.

 

4. Conclusion

Abbott, being a former cleric, was upset about people starting to not believe in god. We do not have to accept Abbott’s idea of god. There are multiple religions and modern civilization has enabled us to live morally without any religion. However, there are two points that we have to acknowledge from Abbott’s book. We can assume how things were in the Victorian era and expand our creativity by imagining about life in two dimension world.