The Absent-Minded Professors of Laputa — Gulliver's Travels

On Laputa, Gulliver meets a race as strange as he is to them. Their heads recline left or right; one eye turns inward, the other to the zenith. Servants called flappers carry bladders of pebbles and strike mouths, ears, and sometimes eyes to rouse minds lost in speculation. Ascending to the palace, his guides forget him until flapped back to duty. The king sits an hour over globes and instruments before pages flap him awake. When Gulliver signals he needs no flapper, the court writes him down as dull. He learns their language over days while dinner arrives as equilateral mutton, fiddle, shaped ducks, and bread cut into cones and cylinders. A tailor takes his altitude by quadrant and delivers clothes ruined by a miscalculation, an ordinary accident here. The island moves northeast toward Lagado; Gulliver feels nothing of the flight. The court plays three hours of music they call the music of the spheres. Petitions rise on packthreads like schoolboys' kite papers; wine and food come up by pulleys. Their houses bevel without a right angle because practical geometry is vulgar; on paper they excel, in life they are clumsy. They are bad reasoners, vehement in opposition, strangers to imagination, secret believers in astrology, and loud amateurs of news and party politics. They live in perpetual disquiet over distant catastrophes: the sun swallowing the earth, the next comet in one, and, thirty years, worlds annihilated. They ask after the sun's health before breakfast and cannot enjoy ordinary pleasure. Laputian women despise rapt husbands and take mainland lovers openly, even before a husband buried in figures if he has paper and no flapper. A great court lady hides in Lagado rags with a beating footman, returns forgiven, then steals down again with her jewels. After a month Gulliver can answer the king, who shows not the least curiosity about laws, governments, religions, or manners abroad, but questions only mathematics and hears even that with contempt and indifference. Brilliance floats above the world it cannot build, govern, or love.