Island - Aldous Huxley [44]
“Do you have to see a lot of her?”
“Very little. She has her own job and her own friends. In our part of the world ‘Mother’ is strictly the name of a function. When the function has been duly fulfilled, the title lapses; the ex-child and the woman who used to be called ‘Mother’ establish a new kind of relationship. If they get on well together, they continue to see a lot of one another. If they don’t, they drift apart. Nobody expects them to cling, and clinging isn’t equated with loving—isn’t regarded as anything particularly creditable.”
“So all’s well now. But what about then? What happened when you were a child, growing up between two people who couldn’t bridge the gulf that separated them? I know what that means—the fairy-story ending in reverse, ‘And so they lived unhappily ever after.’”
“And I’ve no doubt,” said Susila, “that if we hadn’t been born in Pala, we would have lived unhappily ever after. As it was, we got on, all things considered, remarkably well.”
“How did you manage to do that?”
“We didn’t; it was all managed for us. Have you read what the Old Raja says about getting rid of the two thirds of sorrow that’s homemade and gratuitous?”
Will nodded. “I was just reading it when you came in.”
“Well, in the bad old days,” she went on, “Palanese families could be just as victimizing, tyrant-producing and liar-creating as yours can be today. In fact they were so awful that Dr. Andrew and the Raja of the Reform decided that something had to be done about it. Buddhist ethics and primitive village communism were skillfully made to serve the purposes of reason, and in a single generation the whole family system was radically changed.” She hesitated for a moment. “Let me explain,” she went on, “in terms of my own particular case—the case of an only child of two people who couldn’t understand one another and were always at cross-purposes or actually quarreling. In the old days, a little girl brought up in those surroundings would have emerged as either a wreck, a rebel, or a resigned hypocritical conformist. Under the new dispensation I didn’t have to undergo unnecessary suffering, I wasn’t wrecked or forced into rebellion or resignation. Why? Because from the moment I could toddle, I was free to escape.”
“To escape?” he repeated. “To escape?” It seemed too good to be true.
“Escape,” she explained, “is built into the new system. Whenever the parental Home Sweet Home becomes too unbearable, the child is allowed, is actively encouraged—and the whole weight of public opinion is behind the encouragement—to migrate to one of its other homes.”
“How many homes does a Palanese child have?”
“About twenty on the average.”
“Twenty? My God!”
“We all belong,” Susila explained, “to an MAC—a Mutual Adoption Club. Every MAC consists of anything from fifteen to twenty-five assorted couples. Newly elected brides and bridegrooms, old-timers with growing children, grandparents and great-grandparents—everybody in the club adopts everyone else. Besides our own blood relations, we all have our quota of deputy mothers, deputy fathers, deputy aunts and uncles, deputy brothers and sisters, deputy babies and toddlers and teen-agers.”
Will shook his head. “Making twenty families grow where only one grew before.”
“But what grew before was your kind of family. The twenty are all our kind.” As though reading instructions from a cookery book, “Take one sexually inept wage slave,” she went on, “one dissatisfied female, two or (if preferred) three small television addicts; marinate in a mixture of Freudism and dilute Christianity; then bottle up tightly in a four-room flat and stew for fifteen years in their own juice. Our recipe