Gulliver meets the inhabitants of the Flying (Floating) Island, learns that it is called Laputa, and immediately realizes that the inhabitants are a distracted people who have a very limited attention span and very narrow interests; their main concerns are essentially mathematics and music. Gulliver observes the Laputans. Their clothes, which do not fit, are decorated with astrological symbols and musical figures. They spend their time listening to the music of the spheres. They believe in astrology and worry constantly that the sun will go out. The Laputan houses, he notices, are badly built, without accurate right angles. The Laputan women are highly sexed and adulterous, preferring men from the island of Balnibarbi. The Laputan husbands, who are so abstracted in mathematical and musical calculations, don’t know that their wives are adulterous.
