I should find myself contrasting my position with my preconceptions
about a Utopian visit. I had always imagined myself as standing
outside the general machinery of the State--in the distinguished
visitors' gallery, as it were--and getting the new world in a series
of comprehensive perspective views. But this Utopia, for all the
sweeping floats of generalisation I do my best to maintain, is
swallowing me up. I find myself going between my work and the room
in which I sleep and the place in which I dine, very much as I went
to and fro in that real world into which I fell five-and-forty years
ago. I find about me mountains and horizons that limit my view,
institutions that vanish also without an explanation, beyond the
limit of sight, and a great complexity of things I do not understand
and about which, to tell the truth, I do not formulate acute
curiosities. People, very unrepresentative people, people just as
casual as people in the real world, come into personal relations
with us, and little threads of private and immediate interest spin
themselves rapidly into a thickening grey veil across the general
view. I lose the comprehensive interrogation of my first arrival; I
find myself interested in the grain of the wood I work, in birds
among the tree branches, in little irrelevant things, and it is only
now and then that I get fairly back to the mood that takes all
Utopia for its picture.
We spend our first surplus of Utopian money in the reorganisation
of our wardrobes upon more Utopian lines; we develop acquaintance
with several of our fellow workers, and of those who share our
table at the inn. We pass insensibly into acquaintanceships and the
beginnings of friendships. The World Utopia, I say, seems for a time
to be swallowing me up. At the thought of detail it looms too big
for me. The question of government, of its sustaining ideas, of
race, and the wider future, hang like the arch of the sky over these
daily incidents, very great indeed, but very remote. These people
about me are everyday people, people not so very far from the
minimum wage, accustomed much as the everyday people of earth are
accustomed to take their world as they find it. Such enquiries as
I attempt are pretty obviously a bore to them, pass outside their
range as completely as Utopian speculation on earth outranges a
stevedore or a member of Parliament or a working plumber. Even the
little things of daily life interest them in a different way. So
I get on with my facts and reasoning rather slowly. I find myself
looking among the pleasant multitudes of the streets for types that
promise congenial conversation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account