The straight line sneered at the curve. Look at me. Straight as a
die, not a deviation to be seen, no bends, no ungainly twists. The curve
replied: you are looking at me only from your biased point of view. You see me from
one side represented on a flat surface. Your impression of me is from only one
visual plane. You are limited. Try to accept that appearances can deceive. For
example, think about where you are standing. And don’t say you know where I am coming
from. You don’t know where I am
coming from, because you don’t know where I’ve been, where I am, and where I
will be. Be the mouse in the field looking up at the sky. Be the bird looking
down at the scene below. Be the god that tries to see all.
Look at me in three-dimensional space. Let’s imagine we are both a
thin wire. I look just as straight as you from a certain perspective. Yes, some
see me like that. And what about you? You are exactly the same from all angles.
Not very interesting, one could say. And looking at you directly from your tip,
you are nothing more than a dot, a speck, a full stop. And anyway, if you tried
to extend yourself until you stop, you would come back to where you started
from. In other words, you would discover that you are also a curve.
Don’t worry. I know your contributions, your usefulness, and your
potential. You are rightly proud of your heritage. You joined with your kind to
create the right-angled trinity. You gave us shapes and forms that have defined
our evolution throughout history. Your geometry gave us the wonders of
architecture that exist even today, after thousands of years. But we’ve also
lent our support, often literally: the sensuous columns, arches; the rib and
the dome. The violin is a thing of beauty largely because of us, and we even
enhance its acoustic properties. We can make people smile, cry, indulge in
ecstatic reverie; we are often cited in descriptions of the beauty of the human
body; and we are abundant in the primordial shapes of the egg and the embryo. I could go on and on, but if this isn’t enough for you, go and
have a word with the parabola, the circle, and the sphere.
