“Strike flat the thick rotundity of the world,” cries Lear as 
a curse to snap “the most precious square of sense.” And the 
striking flat, the isolation of the visual is the great achievement 
of Gutenberg and the Mercator projection. And Dantzig (p. 
125) notes: “Thus the alleged properties of the straight line are 
of the geometer’s own making. He deliberately disregards 
thickness and breadth, deliberately assumes that the thing 
common to two such lines, their point of intersection, is 
deprived of all dimension . . . but the assumptions themselves 
are arbitrary, a convenient fiction at best.” It is easy for 
Dantzig to see how fictional classical geometry was. It got huge 
nourishment from printing after being engendered by the 
alphabet. And the non-Euclidean geometries familiar to our 
time also depend on electric technology for their nutriment and 
plausibility, and this is no more seen by mathematicians now 
than the relations to alphabet and print were seen by