The Utopians have brought a sounder physiological science than ours
to bear upon regimen. People know better what to do and what to
avoid, how to foresee and forestall coming trouble, and how to evade
and suppress the subtle poisons that blunt the edge of sensation.
They have put off the years of decay. They keep their teeth, they
keep their digestions, they ward off gout and rheumatism, neuralgia
and influenza and all those cognate decays that bend and wrinkle men
and women in the middle years of existence. They have extended the
level years far into the seventies, and age, when it comes, comes
swiftly and easily. The feverish hurry of our earth, the decay that
begins before growth has ceased, is replaced by a ripe prolonged
maturity. This modern Utopia is an adult world. The flushed romance,
the predominant eroticisms, the adventurous uncertainty of a world
in which youth prevails, gives place here to a grave deliberation,
to a fuller and more powerful emotion, to a broader handling of
life.
Yet youth is here.
Amidst the men whose faces have been made fine by thought and
steadfast living, among the serene-eyed women, comes youth,
gaily-coloured, buoyantly healthy, with challenging eyes, with fresh
and eager face....
For everyone in Utopia who is sane enough to benefit, study and
training last until twenty; then comes the travel year, and many are
still students until twenty-four or twenty-five. Most are still, in
a sense, students throughout life, but it is thought that, unless
responsible action is begun in some form in the early twenties, will
undergoes a partial atrophy. But the full swing of adult life is
hardly attained until thirty is reached. Men marry before the middle
thirties, and the women rather earlier, few are mothers before
five-and-twenty. The majority of those who become samurai do so
between twenty-seven and thirty-five. And, between seventeen and
thirty, the Utopians have their dealings with love, and the play and
excitement of love is a chief interest in life. Much freedom of act
is allowed them so that their wills may grow freely. For the most
part they end mated, and love gives place to some special and more
enduring interest, though, indeed, there is love between older men
and fresh girls, and between youths and maturer women. It is in
these most graceful and beautiful years of life that such freedoms
of dress as the atmosphere of Utopia permits are to be seen, and the
crude bright will and imagination of youth peeps out in ornament and
colour.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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