I call our world Flatland, not because we call it so, but to make its nature clearer to you, my happy readers, who are privileged to live in Space. So begins perhaps the most famous mathematical romance ever written. Penned in 1884, twenty-one years before Albert Einstein revolutionized our notions of space and time, under the pseudonym “A. Square” by the clergyman and Shakespearean scholar Edwin A. Abbott, Flatland was a poignant tale told by a wistful two-dimensional being who had just discovered the miraculous existence of three-dimensional space and longed to enjoy it. The unhappy hero of this saga urged us lucky Spacelanders to recognize the beauty of the higher-dimensional universes that he thus envisaged. At around the same time that Abbott was writing Flatland, a lonely and tragic artist on the Continent was imagining another universe beyond the realm of our perception. Vincent Van Gogh was a tortured genius who is said to have sold but a single painting in his lifetime. Yet you cannot walk the streets of Amsterdam today without seeing reproductions in storefront windows of his haunting self-portraits or his landscapes with yellow skies and blue earth.
What do You think about Hiding In The Mirror (2010)?
