"Your case will certainly have to be considered further," he says,
with the faintest of threatening notes in his tone. "But at the same
time"--hand out to those copies from the index again--"there you
are, you know!"
Section 8
When my botanist and I have talked over and exhausted every
possibility of our immediate position, we should turn, I think, to
more general questions.
I should tell him the thing that was becoming more and more apparent
in my own mind. Here, I should say, is a world, obviously on the
face of it well organised. Compared with our world, it is like a
well-oiled engine beside a scrap-heap. It has even got this
confounded visual organ swivelling about in the most alert and
lively fashion. But that's by the way.... You have only to look at
all these houses below. (We should be sitting on a seat on the
Gutsch and looking down on the Lucerne of Utopia, a Lucerne that
would, I insist, quite arbitrarily, still keep the Wasserthurm and
the Kapellbrucke.) You have only to mark the beauty, the simple
cleanliness and balance of this world, you have only to see the free
carriage, the unaffected graciousness of even the common people, to
understand how fine and complete the arrangements of this world must
be. How are they made so? We of the twentieth century are not going
to accept the sweetish, faintly nasty slops of Rousseauism that so
gratified our great-great-grandparents in the eighteenth. We know
that order and justice do not come by Nature--"if only the policeman
would go away." These things mean intention, will, carried to a
scale that our poor vacillating, hot and cold earth has never known.
What I am really seeing more and more clearly is the will beneath
this visible Utopia. Convenient houses, admirable engineering that
is no offence amidst natural beauties, beautiful bodies, and a
universally gracious carriage, these are only the outward and
visible signs of an inward and spiritual grace. Such an order means
discipline. It means triumph over the petty egotisms and vanities
that keep men on our earth apart; it means devotion and a nobler
hope; it cannot exist without a gigantic process of inquiry, trial,
forethought and patience in an atmosphere of mutual trust and
concession. Such a world as this Utopia is not made by the chance
occasional co-operations of self-indulgent men, by autocratic rulers
or by the bawling wisdom of the democratic leader. And an
unrestricted competition for gain, an enlightened selfishness, that
too fails us....
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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