Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [261]
“Neither can I. The only trouble is, this commune will be inhabited by and surrounded by members of the human race.”
“That sounds pretty cynical.”
“Well, I wouldn’t want to corrupt you with my cynicism,” I said, and shut up.
But she kept after me; she was serious.
“All right,” I said, “I’ll tell you why I’m dubious. These will be young people in this garden commune, I assume. That means they’ll be stoned half the time–one of the things you can grow in gardens is Cannabis. That won’t go down well with the neighbors. Neither will free-form marriage or the natural-credit Communist economy. They’ll be visited by the cops every week. They’ll be lucky if the American Legion doesn’t burn them out, or sic the dog catcher on their wild life children.”
“None of that has anything to do with them. It only has to do with people outside.”
“Sure,” I said, “but those people aren’t going to go away. If they won’t leave the colony alone I’ll give it six months. If it isn’t molested it might last a year or two. By that time half the people will have drifted away in search of bigger kicks, and the rest will be quarreling about some communal woman, or who got the worst corner of the garden patch, or who ate up all the sweet corn. Satisfying natural desires is fine, but natural desires have a way of being both competitive and consequential. And women may be equal to men, but they aren’t equal in attractiveness any more than men are. Affections have a way of fixing on individuals, which breeds jealousy, which breeds possessiveness, which breeds bad feeling. Q.E.D.”
“You’re judging by past history.”
“All history is past history.”
“All right. Touché. But it doesn’t have to repeat itself.”
“Doesn’t it?”
She sat regarding me in a troubled way, puckering up her mouth and making fishlike, pup-pup-pupping noises with it. “I don’t see why you’re opposed,” she said. “It’s one thing to think it’s sure to fail, but you sound as if you thought it was wrong. I suppose you think it’s lunatic fringe, but why? You can’t think the society we’ve got is so hot. I know you don’t. Haven’t you sort of copped out yourself? What’s this but a rural commune, only you own it and hire the Hawkes family to run it for you?”
“Do you resent that?” I said.
“What? No. No, of course not. I was just asking something. Take marriage, say. Is that such a success story? Why not try a new way? Or look at your grandfather. Is this manifesto so different from the come-on he wrote for the Idaho Mining and Irrigation Company, except that he was doing it for profit? He was trying something that was pretty sure to fail, wasn’t he? Maybe it wasn’t even sound, maybe that sagebrush desert might better have been left in sagebrush, isn’t that what you think? All that big dream of his was dubious ecology, and sort of greedy when you look at it, just another piece of American continent-busting. But you admire your grandfather more than anybody, even though the civilization he was trying to build was this cruddy one we’ve got. Here’s a bunch of people willing to put their lives on the line to try to make a better one. Why put them down?”
“Look, Shelly,” I said, “I didn’t start this discussion. It doesn’t make that much difference to me what they do. You asked me what I thought.”
“I’d really like to know.”
“Is that it?” I said. “I thought you were trying to convert me. That’d be hopeless. I wouldn’t live in a colony like that, myself, for a thousand dollars an hour. I wouldn’t want it next door. I’m not too happy it’s within ten miles.”
“Why?”
“Why? Because their soft-headedness irritates me. Because their beautiful thinking ignores both history and human nature. Because they’d spoil my thing with their thing. Because I don’t think any of them is wise enough to play God and create a human society. Look. I like privacy, I don’t like crowds, I don’t like noise, I don’t like anarchy,