Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [259]
Through most of the summer Shelly has worked seven days a week, the way I like to work, but the last two weekends she has taken off. I supposed she was getting organized to go back to college, but Ada tells me she has been seeing Rasmussen. “She don’t tell me, but I know. Ed saw him over in Nevada City last week, purple pants and all. Honest to John, what she sees in that . . . What’s he hanging around for? What’s he want?”
“Maybe he’s really fond of her.”
But that only got a glare from Ada. She doesn’t want him to be fond of her.
Nevertheless, neither Ada nor I should expect a girl of twenty to sit in this quiet place very long, working seven days a week for the Hermit of Zodiac Cottage. For reasons best known to herself, she chose to cut away from the Berkeley scene and rusticate herself here. But here she is a stranger to everybody she used to know, including her old schoolmates. They have nothing to offer her, she has nothing to give them except an occasion for a lot of lurid gossip. Probably she was the brightest student in Nevada City High, as Ada resentfully says. Somewhere, sometime, somebody taught her to question everything–though it might have been a good thing if he’d also taught her to question the act of questioning. Carried far enough, as far as Shelly’s crowd carries it, that can dissolve the ground you stand on. I suppose wisdom could be defined as knowing what you have to accept, and I suppose by that definition she’s a long way from wise.
Anyway, this afternoon when I was sitting on the porch after lunch she came in and without a word, with only a prying, challenging sort of look, puckering up her mouth into a rosebud, handed me a sheet of paper. It was mimeographed on both sides, with stick figures and drawings of flowers scattered down its margins–a sheet that might have announced the Memorial Day picnic-and-cleanup of some neighborhood improvement association. I’ve got it here. It says me, moodily running a rubber band through her front teeth like dental floss. She said nothing, so I turned the sheet over. On the back were three quotations:
MANIFESTO
WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS TO BE SELF EVIDENT TO EVERYBODY EXCEPT GENERALS, INDUSTRIALISTS, POLITICIANS, PROFESSORS, AND OTHER DINOSAURS:
1) That the excretions of the mass media and the obscenities of school education are forms of mind-pollution.
We believe in meditation, discussion, communion, nature.
2) That possessions, the “my and mine” of this corrupt society, stand between us and a true, clean, liberated vision of the world and ourselves.
We believe in communality, sharing, giving, using without using up. He is wealthiest who owns nothing and needs nothing.
3) That the acquisitive society acquires and uses women as it acquires and uses other natural resources, turning them into slaves, second-class citizens, and biological factories.
We believe in the full equality of men and women. Proprietorship has no place in love or in any good thing of the earth.
4) That the acquisitive society begins to pollute and enslave the minds of children in infancy, turning them into dreadful replicas of their parents and thus perpetuating obscenities.
We believe that children are natural creatures close to the earth, and that they should grow up as part of the wild life.
5) That this society with its wars, waste, poisons, ugliness, and hatred of the natural and innocent must be abandoned or destroyed. To cop out is the first act in the cleansing of the spirit.
We believe in free and voluntary communities of the joyous and generous, male and female, either as garden communities in rural places or as garden enclaves in urban centers, the two working together and circulating freely back and forth–a two–way flow of experience, people, money, gentleness,