My name is A. Round and I shall here transcribe the story of my life as a circle. I live in a country called Curvilinia which is populated almost entirely by circles. We all live together in relative harmony - although we do have a fair share of social issues that deserve being addressed, our social order is well-established by a few basic guidelines. As I tell you the story of my growing up as a circle, you will come to know the simplicity and severity of these guidelines.
Firstly, it must be known that I began my life as a point, nothing more and nothing less. From this I grew steadily in a way my mother liked to describe as "all the infinite directions of God's great dominion". Lucky enough to be born regular, as I was declared by the government after my first few spurts of growth, I grew equally in every possible direction. Being regular, I was entitled to having a diameter, which was directly related to my growth. This growth of diameter was crucial to my good standing in my country, as social status here is dictated by the length of diameter. We may not hesitate to say the same about circumference, because circumference is a property of all curvilinear shapes. This distinction between diameter and circumference has everything to do with my society's strict intolerance for irregular shapes.
To give you an idea of this intolerance and the ways that it is expressed, I will discuss the story of a childhood friend of mine whose current whereabouts I can not ascertain. The social structure of our schooling days was quite indicative of how things were to be in our future; those regular figures with the greatest diameters exercised the most power over the rest of us. I was of good enough fortune to be a fairly sizable regular shape. My friend, E. Lips, was not of such good fortune. He used to think, were he only more regular he would have a greater diameter than the rest of his crew of oppressors - his circumference was already twice as great as the most prominent circle. But, having been defined by the government as a "Deviation of the First Degree", E. Lips would suffer for the rest of his life.
Perhaps the only degree of revenge that E.Lips could exact on his oppressors was the knowledge that soon they would lose their social status as a matter of age. This is because all of us citizens of Curvilinia reach a certain climax in our lives where our diameters begin to contract. In this way, age is a very important factor in our society, as it directly relates to our diameter and thus our social status. The prime of our lives is related to our point of having the greatest diameter, after which life consequently gets us worse for those who concern themselves with status. We thus refer to this phase as a "mid-life crisis".
I write this memoir for two reasons: firstly, there is something which I must purge from myself so that I can spend my remaining lifetime content, and secondly, I would like to discuss the frustrations I have had with the dogmatic social climate of Curvilinia.
Firstly, I must confess to something which would have me incarcerated if revealed publicly. Although, as I stated previously, I had been classified as a regular early in life, I noticed in the stage right between my conception and my prime that I was not developing at an equal rate in all directions. I grew highly insecure about this, not allowing myself to be touched by others so that they should not discover my irregularity. On one occasion I accidentally bumped into a certain critical fellow by the name of N. Spector. I could tell that he had felt my irregularity - I feared for my life. Until this day, I still do not know why he did not report me, but have remained both thankful and guilty. I write this to explain that though I was truly irregular, I realized with age, particularly after I had reached my prime, that such concerns were so trivial compared to the great philosophical issues which have plagued our great thinkers - most of whom were irregulars themselves. My theory is that as irregular shapes, they are more willing to accept the truth of nature, which is that she is not always as symmetrical as our minds would like to think or our forms would like to show.
My questions remaining for my time here concern my existence - what caused it, and what purpose does it fulfill? Why would God choose to make some of us glorious, and others pathetic? Why would he choose to make us live to grow to a great shape and then to diminish and vanish from the face of our land? And what happens after I return to a point? I witnessed my parents diminish to this state, whereupon we could no longer communicate, before they passed into what the clergy have called "the next plane", though I don't know why. I wonder why for so many of us citizens of Curvilinia, the course of life seems so obvious without its very principles being questioned. Clearly, we are want of explanation, and I should hope that I may arrive at some suitable answer before my circumference shrinks so small as to no longer be able to contain my thoughts.