precedent which builds on existing precedent: saying because this didn’t work then it won’t work now. But ‘then’ isn’t ‘now’. In Darcy’s Utopia everyone will understand that the lessons of history are nonexistent. No doubt history will be taught but in classes, remember, made up solely of children who wish to be in them, and teachers who enjoy imparting information and rejoice in the excitement of new ideas, who have a sense of the flow of mankind’s history: how we have progressed out of primitivism, barbarity, into self-knowledge and empathy with others; how in the spite of our natures we have achieved at least an attempt at civilization.
In Darcy’s Utopia nostalgia will be out of fashion. We will look back into the past with horror, not with envy and delight—we will stop our romantic nonsense about the rural tranquillity of once upon a time, which is, if you ask me, nothing but the projected fantasy of old and miserable men who, looking back into their own childhoods, see paradise. But it is a false paradise, falsely remembered. Wishful thinking clouds our memory. Times were better then, we think. We assume that what is true for us individually is true for society too. But it isn’t. The antithesis is true. One by one we grow old and decline, but our societies increase in vigour, grow richer in wisdom, stronger in empathy, as we hand our knowledge down, generation from generation. Our own individual fate clouds our vision: we stumble and fall, exhausted, but pass the baton on, runners all in this great race of ours. We should not get too depressed about it. I, Eleanor Darcy, have no children: children are the great cop-out, the primrose path to non-thought, to destruction. Leave it all to them, the fecund say, that’s all we have to think about. Wave after pointless wave, generation after generation, looking backwards, saying better then. Mine is the pebbly, difficult, problematic path, thorny with impossible ideas, genderless; here you get spat upon, jeered at, derided, but it is the only path which leads forward to heaven upon earth.
And why should we not have it? I tell you, if you look back, you will get burned, like Lot’s wife, to a pillar of salt; Lot’s wife, nostalgic for the past. In Darcy’s Utopia it will be very bad form to hark back; collecting antiques for the domestic home will be outré. A museum will be the only place for the artefacts of past ages, and let them be as gloomy and dismal as can be. In Darcy’s Utopia it will be accepted that museums will be very boring places indeed. If you want to subdue the children you only have to take them on a visit to a museum, and they will behave at once, for fear of being taken there again.
Room service had brought breakfast, and the mail. Valerie sat up in bed, Hugo still asleep beside her, and read the transcript. What bliss, she thought, what paradise, thus to live. Someone else to cook and clean, and bring the food: to be a man’s lover, not his mother/wife. She would live in the present. She would avoid forever the trap of nostalgia. She could see that the pleasure of this moment could, so easily, turn into pain, simply because it no longer existed. How was that to be avoided?
Q: But won’t that make for a heartless, soulless place? Surely we need the resonance of the past in order to enrich the present?
A: There you go again! Well, it’s understandable. Set foot outside your door, outside your little patch of safety, and lo, chaos waits; disease, poverty, madness, hurt, ebbs and flows all around: you’re knee deep in it. If you don’t get mugged your conscience gets pricked: the beggar at the door offends, the homeless in the alley hurts; drunkards sleep in every alley, the mad stand on the motorway and shake their fists. Those that have not reproach you: those that have, braying about profit and self-interest, offend you. You cannot believe that the past was worse than this. Rather, you don’t want to believe it was. Wars lay waste a generation, they say: fear of war has wasted one of ours.
And how we made them feel it, our young, with our talk of nuclear winter and Armageddon! The revenge of the old upon the young, to deprive them thus of all hope of the future. Look at them now: how they appal you! Hollow-eyed, white-faced,