Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [262]
“Now you’re talking,” Shelly said. “Tell me.”
“All right. I have no faith in free-form marriage. It isn’t marriage, it’s promiscuity, and there’s no call for civilization to encourage promiscuity. I cite you the VD statistics for California as one small piece of evidence. I’m very skeptical about the natural-credit Communist economy: how does it fare when it meets a really high-powered and ruthless economy such as ours? You can’t retire to weakness–you’ve got to learn to control strength. As for gentleness and love, I think they’re harder to come by than this sheet suggests. I think they can become as coercive a conformity as anything Mr. Hershey or Mr. Hoover ever thought up. Furthermore, I’m put off by the aggressively unfeminine and the aggressively female women that would be found in a commune like this. I’m put off by long hair, I’m put off by irresponsibility, I never liked Whitman, I can’t help remembering that good old wild Thoreau wound up a tame surveyor of Concord house lots.”
It was quite a harangue. About the middle of it she began to grin, I think to cover up embarrassment and anger. “Well,” she said when I ran down, “I stirred up the lions. What’s that supposed to mean, that about Thoreau?”
As long as I had gone that far, I thought I might as well go the rest of the way. “How would I know what it means?” I said. “I don’t know what anything means. What it suggests to me is that the civilization he was contemptuous of–that civilization of men who lived lives of quiet desperation–was stronger than he was, and maybe righter. It outvoted him. It swallowed him, in fact, and used the nourishment he provided to alter a few cells in its corporate body. It grew richer by him, but it was bigger than he was. Civilizations grow by agreements and accommodations and accretions, not by repudiations. The rebels and the revolutionaries are only eddies, they keep the stream from getting stagnant but they get swept down and absorbed, they’re a side issue. Quiet desperation is another name for the human condition. If revolutionaries would learn that they can’t remodel society by day after tomorrow–haven’t the wisdom to and shouldn’t be permitted to–I’d have more respect for them. Revolutionaries and sociologists. God, those sociologists! They’re always trying to reclaim a tropical jungle with a sprinkling can full of weed killer. Civilizations grow and change and decline-they aren’t remade.”
She was watching me steadily, discreetly and indulgently smiling. “But your grandfather needed the bottle.”
“What does that . . . ?” I started to say. Then, “Quiet desperation, you mean? It may be the best available alternative.”
I have not had a drink for a week, Ada is upset and confused when in the evening after my bath I make her take a drink but won’t take one myself. Her generosity makes her uneasy. And I don’t need her daughter to remind me of the strength, maybe even the necessity, of human weakness, and the harshness of the pressures civilized living can put on a man. In the land of heart’s desire, up in North San Juan, these things don’t apply.
The rubber band that Shelly was running through her teeth broke, and snapped her on the lip. Wincing, she put her fingers to her mouth, but her frown didn’t leave her face. Through her fingers she said, “You think Larry is a kook.”
“I never met him,” I said. “Sight unseen, I’d say he bites off more than I think he can chew.”
“He’s very bright, you know.”
“I haven’t the slightest doubt. So was Bronson Alcott.”
“Who was he, Brook Farm?”
“Fruitlands. One I forgot to mention.”
“Oh.”
Probably she didn’t hear what I said. She was thinking about her husband, boy friend, mate, whatever he