The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [55]
One response to the Decimation was to extol the virtues of the work ethic even more highly, to construe the catastrophe as proof that ceaseless toil was the only way to secure the stability and Utopian perfection of the ecosphere and the econosphere. But this was not the only response; others were led by the drift in history to feel that the work ethic had betrayed them and that New Humanity ought not to live by toil alone.
There were, I suppose, few better exemplars of this new ideological conflict than myself and Sharane Fereday. It was, however, our marriage rather than our divorce that offered a pointer to future history. As individuals, we failed to reconcile our differences, but intellectual history marches to a different drum, in which thesis and antithesis must in the end by reconciled by synthesis. While Sharane and I parted, the world groped toward a new balance, and that balance was neo-Epicureanism: a philosophy which asserted that it was not only possible to mix business and pleasure but absolutely necessary in a New Human context.
I had already tried to make that compromise within my marriage, but Sharane had been unwilling to meet me halfway—or, indeed, to admit that I had actually come anywhere near halfway in my attempt to reach out to her. Once we had parted, however, I set out to use my solitude bravely in order to become a much better neo-Epicurean.
THIRTY
I took the business of my own remaking very seriously. Taking what inspiration I could from the Greek myths I had analyzed so painstakingly in Death in the Ancient World, I took great care to do nothing to excess, and I tried with all my might to derive an altogether appropriate pleasure from everything I did, work and play alike. I took equally great care to cultivate a proper love for the commonplace, training myself to a finer pitch of perfection than I had ever achieved before in all the techniques of physiological control necessary to physical fitness and quiet metabolism.
I soon convinced myself that I had transcended such primitive and adolescent goals as happiness and had cultivated instead a truly civilized ataraxia: a calm of mind whose value went beyond the limits of ecstasy and exultation. By the time I reached my 150th birthday I was sure that I had mastered the art and science of New Humanity and was fully prepared to meet the infinite future—but that conviction was, unfortunately, a trifle hubristic.
After the publication of Death in the Ancient World I lived for twenty more years in Alexandria, although my portion of the credit left unused by Mama Sajda and Mama Siorane allowed me to move from the caps tack to the outer suburbs. I rented a simple villa that had been cleverly gantzed out of the desert sands: sands that still gave an impression of timelessness even though they had been restored to wilderness as recently as the twenty-fifth century, when Egypt’s food economy had been realigned to take full advantage of new techniques in artificial photosynthesis.
In 2669, when I felt that it was time for a change, I decided that I would like to live for a while in a genuine ancient wilderness—one that had never been significantly transformed by the busy hands of humankind. There were, of course, few such places remaining, and the busy hands of humankind were already at work in all of them. I did not want to return to the Himalayas, so I looked again at the other possibility that my foster parents had seriously considered: Antarctica. They had rejected it because of the rapid development of Amundsen City and its immediate environs, but the Continent Without Nations was a true