Juster's Interpretation In The Forest Of Sight

A sea is a body of water surrounded by land on all sides, significantly smaller than an ocean. Thus, by choosing a sea as the Kingdom’s water source, Juster places emphasis on the relationship between the lands and the sea. The dominating size of the Sea of Knowledge and its name (“knowledge is power”) convey the region’s importance. Further attention is drawn to it due to the stylized nature of the letters that begin and end its title. Both kingdoms are located along the borders of the sea as they rely on it for trade, suggesting that all of mankind relies upon a unified and comprehensive source of knowledge. After all, it was only by sailing across the sea that the First King found and built the Kingdom of Wisdom, limning the sea as a vehicle

TPT’s forest is the Forest of Sight; as sight is representative of intelligence and truth, the place-name renders the forest as a location conducive to knowledge inquiry and acquisition. A conflict between this notion and Juster’s interpretation is established by the main locations within the forest: Illusions and Reality. There are two regions of clearing in the forest, insinuating the presence of human settlement; one is unmarked and Illusions and Reality are on opposite sides of the other clearing. An illusion is a false interpretation of sight; reality is how things are. In TPT, Reality was once a beautiful city; however, as people overlooked their environment, Reality vanished, and they began to see Illusions in its place, leading to false sight within the Forest of Sight. The ironic naming is also present in the Valley of Sound, wherein sounds that were not heard disappeared. In the present day, Dr. Dischord releases sounds outside of the Valley and the Soundkeeper stores the remaining sounds within the Valley. The lack of sight in the Forest of Sight and the lack of sound in the Valley of Sound advocates the importance of awareness and consciousness to prevent imbalance and a dissonant world from

Culture
As TPT’s society began in the City of Wisdom which expanded into the Kingdom of Wisdom, wisdom is an integral part of the map and the land it depicts. Juster named the City of Wisdom after the House of Wisdom, a medieval center of learning where scholars from across the world translated knowledge into Arabic during the Islamic Golden Age. However, it declined when one heir focused on scientific inquiry and the other focused on texts, analogous to the respective aims of the kings of Digitopolis and Dictionopolis. Juster may have employed this historical allusion to suggest that wisdom must be unified to be strong.
The map communication model states that one of the cardinal outcomes of a map is that the map user can easily recognize patterns; this requires that “the entire map possess balance and harmony” (Board 1977). As a result, most maps have a figure in the optical center, considered most important due to its visual alignment. However, the Kingdom of Wisdom is a dyadic world, “a unification in one fictional world of two domains in which contrary ethical systems reign” (Wolf 2017), suggesting a lack of balance. Even to a reader unfamiliar with the narrative, the contrast between Digitopolis and Dictionopolis is striking: first, in their names. Diction is from the Latin dicere (to say) meaning word whereas digito is from the Latin digitus (finger or toe) meaning number. Both words are etymologically linked to a common root dik, meaning to direct, suggesting the kingdoms