I’ve always been a reader, or a read-to – some of my earliest memories are of watching my mother’s eyes moving mysteriously side to side as she read aloud. She continued to read aloud to our family until we left home as young adults, with my brothers and me and my dad spread out in the living room, our minds making pictures as she read Cheaper By the Dozen and The Best Christmas Pageant Ever and one whose title I don’t remember but that I thought about forever – perhaps it is fitting that I don’t recall the title, because the main character was a boy who didn’t himself have a name, just “Boy.” I wasn’t precocious enough to teach myself to read, but I learned quickly enough in first grade, and I was off to a life of reading.
I skip discussions about “the most important book you’ve ever read,” because those seem like competitions to name the highest-brow (high-browest?) title. I’m a little embarrassed to name the most important book I’ve ever read, because, well, it is minor book, not well written, by Edwin Abbott Abbott (his parents were first cousins, so his middle name reflects his mother’s maiden name; reminiscent of our own Hugh Brown Brown, although his parents were not near cousins) a 19th century English cleric who would likely be completely forgotten if not for that minor book, Flatland, published in 1884.
Its plot isn’t much. A main character is named “A. Square,” a sort of play on the author’s name (he’s “Abbott Squared” – get it? yuk yuk), and as a resident of Flatland, a two-dimensional world like the surface of a table, he is, in fact a square. All the residents of Flatland are geometric shapes. Men are polygons with various numbers of sides and angles, with intelligence determined by the number of those sides and the width of those angles. Women are mere line segments, with no intelligence at all – they dart around on the surface of Flatland posing a great danger to the multi-sided men, because their sharp ends can pierce the sides of polygons.
There is a rumor – but only a politically dangerous rumor – that Flatland is not all there is to existence. There might be a Lineland, and even a Pointland, where residents of Flatland might not survive. But, glory upon glory, there might also be Spaceland, a world that Flatlanders can barely conceive, a world of greater dimensions, where enlightened beings are – gasp – Spheres! possessing all powers and all intelligence. In the book’s most mesmerizing scene, A Sphere appears to A Square – or rather, appears as well as a three-dimensional object can appear in a two-dimensional world. As A Sphere crosses into and out of Flatland, he appears first as a dot, then as an ever–widening circle, then, after reaching his greatest circumference, an ever-diminishing circle, then finally a dot, and vanishes as A Sphere moves beyond the perception of Flatlanders (imagine a ball passing through a table, and what changing slice of the ball is in contact with the table surface).
And that’s really all there is to it. It’s clumsily written, satirizes Victorian sexism, and introduces non-mathematicians to dimensions higher than our perceived three.
So why do I count it as the most important book I ever read?
I read it after I’d been home from my mission a year or two, moving aimlessly through my own lower dimensions (working at deadend jobs, financially unable to return to school, recovering from my mission, absolutely no plans for life), because the mother of a friend gave it to me and asked me to read it to help her understand it. I don’t know why. We never talked about it. I read it and gave it back to her.
But reading it worked a profound change in me.
Being “smart” in the way elementary and high school kids are measured as “smart,” and liking to read, meant that I had consumed a great deal of information of one kind or another. But, frankly, it was all passive. I read and remembered stuff because some teacher poured that stuff into me, either orally or by telling me what to read and how to read it. And then the next teacher poured more stuff into me. I could recall it at will, so I passed as “smart.”
But Flatland required something else. The concept of the fourth dimension was difficult for me – I had encountered it only in mystifying, incomprehensible algebraic equations where I most definitely was not “smart.” The writing style was awful, a burden to slog through. But I kept at it, bit by bit, rereading pages when necessary, working out each description of Flatland and Lineland and Pointland and Spaceland until I could see them in my mind, and could imagine A Sphere passing through Flatland and how awe-inspiring it was as his form grew and shrank for no apparent reason.
And something finally clicked, at age 25 or so. I might never get back to school, but I most definitely could learn anything I chose to learn, and possibly do anything I chose to do. I didn’t have to wait for permission, or for some teacher to pour stuff into me. I could analyze anything. I could take ideas apart and put them back together. I could form and support opinions – religious, political, social, artistic. It’s a little – okay, a lot – embarrassing to realize how old I was before I learned that. But I learned it then, rather than later. In a lot of ways, my life really started when I read Flatland.
Maybe the book itself wasn’t that important … but reading it certainly was.
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What is a book that had an unexpected influence on you, and why?
I’ve never read Flatland, but I’ve read descriptions of it, similar to what you give here, and I agree, it’s an incredibly illuminating concept. Thinking about this I could suddenly see how it might be possible that God can exist on a plane somehow “above” us, and see everything at once — all time and space, past, present, and future — just like an object in three-dimensional space can see everything in a two-dimensional plane. A fascinating concept.
P.S. Lots of love also for Cheaper By The Dozen (which I read multiple times as a kid) and The Best Christmas Pageant Ever.
This is awesome, thanks for sharing. I’ve had this awkward, puzzling, challenging, paradigm-shifting experience at times, while reading or studying. Most recently it has been while reading a book about Genesis, called The Lost World of Genesis One. The ruts of my understanding of Genesis are so deep, it’s an effort to conceive of a different interpretation. I also had the same thought as lindberg’s second sentence, while reading your post.
Hmm, I can’t come up with an influential book at the moment, although I can remember some influential things people told me. But I do remember my father describing the most pertinent parts of Flatland to me. It sounds like he left out some of the satirical stuff, but he described the sphere passing through the plane, and that made a lot of sense to me. We concluded that the fourth dimension was probably time–which we also move through. But beyond that, our imagination failed us.
And yes, you are capable of learning anything you set your mind to.
Thanks, lindberg — that’s a great insight. And if we aren’t all reading The Best Christmas Pageant Ever in the next week or two, why are we even celebrating Christmas?
Laura — It really is a great way to introduce higher dimensions, isn’t it?
I never could understand why time is proposed as the fourth dimension. Time isn’t the third dimension to Flatlanders, so why should it be the next highest dimension for us Spacelanders? I want it to be a physical dimension, like the others! I need a book about it …
I too enjoyed flatland, reading it only recently in my mid to late fourties’ but having heard of it in my youth and used geometric ideas to comprehend 2D, 3D, 4D and even 5D “worlds”. I found it logical that a 1D was simply a collection of 0D points, a 2D was a collection of 1D lines, and 3D was just a collection of 2D planes and still further that 4D was just a collection of 3D spaces. In our perceived “3D world” I would consider the 4D world to just be a “collection” of 3D “frames”. It soon come clear to me that the (n)D dimension was just a collection of (n-1)D. I found it fascinating that a 3D entity could perceive or take in an entire 2D world. Or in a 1D world like Line land, a point or segment would need to travel left or right to see “what’s down the line”, or rather travel a distance in some amount of time. (In the book, the line landers used sound to see left or right and flatlanders used light intensity to judge distance). But in the 2D flatland, the shapes could see every point or segment of the line, all at once. To me, the dimension 1 higher is time. In our 3D world, we have to wait through 3D spaces to see what’s next or “remember” what has happened, but a 4D being could see the time line of a 3D world, all at once. Kinda like the old 8mm film where every frame is a 3D world and the secession of frames give the perception of time. But then I tried to imagine a 5D world and really it would be a collection of movies with alternate endings… or possibility. This being would be able to see multiple time lines. So this is as far as my little brain got. Some being in a 6D would be able, not only see entire timelines, but even every possibility… we might call that being God. Just a fun thought experiment .
I would suggest reading “The happiness hypothesis” by Jonathan Haidt. In this book, the concept of an “Elevation” dimension is discussed.
The complex plane in mathematics is also a fascinating and confusing concept using complex numbers (x+i) to explain linearly concepts like frequency and waves.
I love your enthusiasm, Dana! You’ve carried it in a direction I never thought of — I’ll be working it out in my mind for the next while.
As usual, so lucidly written. The question you pose is an interesting one. The book that has had a profound and unexpected influence on me is The Restaurant at The End of the Universe, the second book in Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy series. Even though it was the second book, I read it first when I bought a copy at a book store in Butte, Montana on our way to the Yukon in 1980. I took that road in the yellow wood, and if you want to understand me, that’s a good place to start.
Lonn, your choice is as unlikely as mine. I’ll have to finally read the whole series now (I’ve read only the first) to see what you found in it.
It may not do for you now what it did for me then. I like the silliness of it, but it’s a smart, philosophical silliness. And when I say “philosophical,” it mostly makes fun for philosophy.
Another vote for Cheaper by the Dozen, which I found hilarious, and relatable in parts as the eldest of (only?!) seven kids myself.
I may have read Flatland.. certainly something of that title though I clearly don’t remember the story. I also am uncomfortable with the idea of time as a dimension, and tend to see it is a phenomenon arising when a limit is imposed on the number of available dimensions, which might (maybe?) be another way of looking at it Dana’s explanation is very interesting.
The book that most affected me was That Hideous Strength by C S Lewis, which I read when I must have been 15-17. It’s meant to be the third book in a trilogy, but stands alone quite well I think. (I found the first two to be very improbable). It’s described as an adult fairy tale. What gripped me was the way in which the husband and wife were drawn into opposing sides of what turned out to be a battle of good and evil, and it was at least half way through the book before it was obvious which side was which. I would be more critical about some of it now, but the effect of that was profound at the time.
This is another book I’ll have to look into, Hedgehog — thanks especially for the comments on why it affected you.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Not all of it, unfortunately; Tom Sawyer’s appearance is a misfire, in my opinion. Huck’s ultimate decision not to turn Jim in or not–that he’d rather go to hell for following his conscience than obeying the law–was much more moving for me than I was expecting.
How old were you when you read it, Gary?
This was maybe five or six years ago. So early sixties, maybe? I may have read it earlier. But if I did, I didn’t much, if any, of it. (I was also struck by how truly mean Huck’s alcoholic father was.) I’s just finished Moby Dick, which had taken four or five years to finish.
Ardis, Carl Sagan gave a wonderful explanation of dimensions in his 1980 PBS series Cosmos.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnURElCzGc0
Thanks, Steve; I’ll make time to watch that soon.
I haven’t read Flatland, but I’ve seen enough reviews like yours to get the concepts. I use them to explain how I see the degrees of glory. Outer darkness is like Pointland, the telestial kingdom is like Lineland, the terrestrial kingdom is like Flatland, and the celestial kingdom is like Spaceland. In all except Pointland, one can “progress” eternally in at least one direction, with more directions available in the higher kingdoms. And each kingdom would have some vague recognition that higher kingdoms exist, but would be unable to comprehend them and so would not feel deprived of anything. And because all lines and planes would be subsumed by Spaceland, the inhabitants of Spaceland would not be separated from loved ones in lower kingdoms.
To your actual question, the book that influenced me in the way Flatland influenced you was the Physics of Immortality by Frank Tipler. Tipler’s reputation has taken a hit since he wrote that and the book is full of both bad science and bad theology. Do not expect to find a plausible path to immortality in that book. But he approached the problem mathematically, which lead me to realize that there is no mystery of the universe so big that it cannot be approached mathematically. You just need the right data. Tipler didn’t have it and he knew it–he wrote the book to advocate for building the supercollider in Texas, which would have provided him with the data necessary to prove his hypothesis. It fell to CERN to provide the data (specifically, the mass of the Higgs boson) and his theory promptly collapsed when the boson proved to be much less massive than he had assumed. But that’s not the point. The point is that he was able to construct a testable hypothesis of something that I had always assumed was untestable.
LLeming, it sounds like the experience of reading the book was almost more influential than the content of the book itself — very much like Flatland for me. I’ve never heard of Tipler but I’ll look up something about him. He sounds like someone I should be aware of, at least. Thanks.
Here was how my Dad and I viewed time as the next dimension in Flatland. When the sphere passed through the plane of Flatland, the 2D character couldn’t see the sphere. He only saw a circle getting bigger and then smaller as time passed.
We’re stuck in time which only seems to move one way for us. But maybe for higher beings, time doesn’t have the same limitations, allowing God to see past, present, and future from a single vantage point.
But I don’t demand that anyone else see it that way, and I’m open to all sorts of other dimensions that I can’t see right now.
I listened to Flatland just this week! The reader had a charming British voice, so that made up for the awkward prose. I quite liked it. I was more about society and politics than I expected—at first I was repulsed by the sexism and classism, but then I read that Abbott was satirizing the viewpoints that the main character held. I first read about higher physical dimensions in Liu Cixin’s Death End, but this book was still very enlightening.
What a coincidence, Tygan! Our League of Flatlanders grows!
I’ve read only four or five books that I consider life-changing. One is “Organizational Values in America,” by William Scott and David (Kirk) Hart. While written about corporate America, their book explains brilliantly why the Church as an organization is the way it is. Kirk admitted to me that he wrote the book with the Church in the back of his mind. Their concept of the “organizational imperative” is as perceptive as anything I’ve ever read. Kirk became a friend of mine after I read the book. He was a professor of ethics at BYU’s Marriott School where I also taught for nine years.
Wuthering Heights changed my understanding of what reading is and what writing can do. I must have been 13 or 14 years old when I read it. I had been reading pretty seriously for a long time. I loved reading. But Wuthering Heights was the first book that undid me. It was different from other novels that made me an observer of strange places and adventures. When I read Wuthering Heights I was not observing; I was inside these characters’ roiling hearts.
Wretched adolescence was the time to have that experience. I was ready for it and vulnerable to it. I’m glad that it happened when it did. I’ve wondered if the rational adult version of me might never have discovered that such an experience was possible. And I’ve wondered how important Wuthering Heights was in shaping my mature range of spiritual response. That book taught me that reading can give me access to precious things inside me that I can’t normally see or feel. My Wuthering Heights was a religious experience, in its way.
Roger, I really like that — I wonder whether his having the Church in the back of his mind colored his work enough that there were buried cues that you responded to? And like everybody else here, you’ve given me one more book I need to look up.
“My Wuthering Heights was a religious experience, in its way.” Yes! That’s it! That’s what I was reaching toward with this whole post, that the experience of reading Flatland, in my case, was far more important than anything in its content. And reading it at the right point in my life was key for that.
No single book at this stage of life, but many different books in a wide range of genres and authors that were crucially important at different times, in different ways. I like the Emerson quote that “I can no more remember all the books I have read than all the meals I have eaten. But they have made me.”
Flatland was very important to me when I first read it decades ago. Like most of my early intellectual formation, I got it from my older brother, Stephen, who either handed it to me with a prescription to read, or I found his copy laying around and picked it up. I was not familiar, in the least, with the Victorian milieu from which it sprang, but it still opened my mind to new ways of looking at the world. I never saw the world in quite the same way again. I have a couple of copies I share with my grandkids.
I read _Flatland_ at an early age, and it certainly made an impression on me. Physics posits, or rather some physicists posit, far more dimensions to account for all the phenomena they study. I have yet to find a meaningful way to get past the four spacial dimensions depicted in squashed hypercube models made from toothpicks and mini-marshmallows, but I can appreciate how higher dimensions could be useful to theorists.
Time as a fourth dimension I look at a using Hamiltonian mathematics. Quaternions are an extension of the idea of complex numbers which combine a real value with three imaginary parts with basis vectors i, j, and k. I see space as the three “imaginary” parts and time as the “real” quantity. The math is kind of messy, but it manages to put space and time in the same schema with a significant difference between them built in. It makes sense to me anyway.
Last, I want to share the book that I found transformational, _Sylvie and Bruno_ by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson aka Lewis Carrol. This work, like his Alice books has a lot of whimsy, but is more a tale for adults than his more familiar works. The story is written on three levels, late 19th century England, a fairy world that occupies an overlapping space, and a transitional zone where the two worlds meet up. The narrator character is a ailing older man and encounters with the fairy children Sylvie and Bruno. It opens with a poorly synchronized protest where the peasants demand “Less bread, more taxes,” and continues with adventures that explore physics, language, government, and the nature of love. It makes me cry every time I read it, and if you read it you will finally know the reason the sky is blue. I freely admit it is not everyone’s dish, but it affects me deeply each time I reread it.