My name is A. Ligned and I would like to share with you some of my thoughts about this world I have inhabited, as I intuitively feel that my days are coming to a close. I have lived my life a happy line, surrounded by the only two friends I have ever known, points A and B (who are formally known as Alex and Beatrice). Though I have enjoyed remaining in one place for a long time, ruminating on the finer points of life, I have often taken great pleasure in displacing myself either this away or that accompanied by my two defining point friends. I have always considered myself to be an equal to them however I have often pondered at great length whether they are of the same essence as myself. As a being that we, in modern parlance, refer to as a "line segment", I understand that I constitute an infinite array of points spread out across my universe. In this sense, I am given what the contemporary philosophers have described as "dimension" - they claim that I possess this attribute, though my understanding of it, even after all these years of contemplation, is still embarrassingly narrow. All that I can be certain of is my distinction from these beings like Alex and Beatrice who are friends of mine; these philosophers have considered such point beings non-dimensional, or lacking this strange attribute of dimension. It is for this reason that I wonder whether or not I have been granted an innate superiority over Alex and Beatrice, and whether I should allow this thought to give me a sense of confidence which I may or may not deserve! But whenever I do allow such flattering thoughts to go to my head, I realize that I myself am nothing but a series of points, all of which are considered to have no dimension, so in what way is it possible for me to gain dimension if the sum of all things which constitute me do not possess dimension at all! Furthermore, how could I consider myself superior to Alex and Beatrice when they are necessary for my very existence? If it weren't for them, I would not be defined, I would not have the length or "character" (as the poets refer to it) that I now consider myself to have. Such thoughts still plague me in my old age and disturb my sleep.
You might ask how it is I know that my life is coming to a close. For lack of better terminology, I feel that I am losing my substance. With each passing day I feel that there is less to me; as I have already mentioned, I am constituted by a series of touching points confined by the boundaries of my universe. However, when I arise from sleep, I cannot help but notice that I feel as though I consist of less points. I do not know exactly what this entails, as this is a novel feeling for me. But I have deduced the following... When my life began I was nothing but a point. Although I had no consciousness at the time, I was relayed this tale by my two endpoints (my creation occurred through their splitting, a process which the biologists refer to as meiosis). I distinctly recall in my youth discerning with careful attention that I was gaining more substance on a regular basis. Along with this experience I noticed a correlation. The two points to which I owe all of my existence were becoming more, well, distant from each other. Where they once coincided and agreed, they were now more and more discordant with each new gain in substance. I have often wondered if there is a cause behind such a relationship--it saddens me to think that after all of my contemplation, I have still come up short. Now that I feel like I am losing substance, I have also begun to notice that there has been a greater communication between my endpoints. For this reason I fear that the exact same process which characterized the opening stages of my life is taking place in reverse, for which reason I believe that I have approached the closing stages of my life. I consider myself a philosopher and feel it my duty to explain the cause for the correlation of my substance and the communication of my endpoints, if not to answer the greater question of why I exist in the first place! What is the cause for the form that my life has taken? What explains that at a given point I have been created and that at a given point I may "disappear", so to speak. I can only hope that my documentation may one day be of service to some individual intelligent enough to figure out these seemingly unsolvable puzzles.