So presently to bed and to sleep, but not at once to sleep. At first
my brain, like a dog in unfamiliar quarters, must turn itself round
for a time or so before it lies down. This strange mystery of a
world of which I have seen so little as yet--a mountain slope, a
twilit road, a traffic of ambiguous vehicles and dim shapes, the
window lights of many homes--fills me with curiosities. Figures and
incidents come and go, the people we have passed, our landlord,
quietly attentive and yet, I feel, with the keenest curiosity
peeping from his eyes, the unfamiliar forms of the house parts and
furnishings, the unfamiliar courses of the meal. Outside this little
bedroom is a world, a whole unimagined world. A thousand million
things lie outside in the darkness beyond this lit inn of ours,
unthought-of possibilities, overlooked considerations, surprises,
riddles, incommensurables, a whole monstrous intricate universe of
consequences that I have to do my best to unravel. I attempt
impossible recapitulations and mingle the weird quality of dream
stuff with my thoughts.
Athwart all this tumult of my memory goes this queer figure of my
unanticipated companion, so obsessed by himself and his own
egotistical love that this sudden change to another world seems only
a change of scene for his gnawing, uninvigorating passion. It occurs
to me that she also must have an equivalent in Utopia, and then that
idea and all ideas grow thin and vague, and are dissolved at last in
the rising tide of sleep....
CHAPTER THE THIRD
Utopian Economics
Section 1
These modern Utopians with the universally diffused good manners,
the universal education, the fine freedoms we shall ascribe to them,
their world unity, world language, world-wide travellings,
world-wide freedom of sale and purchase, will remain mere
dreamstuff, incredible even by twilight, until we have shown that at
that level the community will still sustain itself. At any rate, the
common liberty of the Utopians will not embrace the common liberty
to be unserviceable, the most perfect economy of organisation still
leaves the fact untouched that all order and security in a State
rests on the certainty of getting work done. How will the work of
this planet be done? What will be the economics of a modern
Utopia?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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