needn’t think he was. Gillian wept—equally out of both eyes, Eleanor was interested to see.
Eleanor said, ‘Well, I must be off. Have you ever thought of taking up catering, Gillian? The chocolate cake was wonderful!’ Gillian said tearfully she couldn’t say she had. Eleanor said perhaps now Gillian was part of the family she’d like to help her out in a little something she’d said she’d do up at the university, and Gillian said okay, anything to get away from this dreary lot. What she couldn’t stand was ill health, especially if it was mental.
Valerie sits up in bed and listens to tape
Q: WILL THERE BE political censorship in Darcy’s Utopia?
A: Of course not. Why should there be? If anyone can think of any better way to organize things, let them say so: if they can get ten people to agree with them, let them put it to our parliament of popular folk (leavened, if you remember, with a few obvious and self-declared baddies) and everything will be done to accommodate them. It will be government by consensus, not confrontation: government not by power seekers, for where will be the advantages of power since not money, but diversion, and the pleasurable exercise of skill will be the reward of work? Government not by robber barons, for what can they rob that will be of value to them that others cannot have by simply stretching out the hand? But by those who like to see things running smoothly, and who will be able to disinvest themselves of a block of Community Units on the day they resign—the exact amount subject to popular vote. There will be no censors and, as we know, very few policemen, though sufficient well-meaning and officious folk, no doubt, to organize the short-term or long-term exile of those people others simply cannot stand.
Q: You mean to be unlikeable will be a crime?
A: Put it like that if you must. ‘Unlikeable’ in the sense of ‘antisocial’. There will be no obligation to chatter and smile, if that’s what you mean; though I hope many will feel like doing so.
Q: How large is Darcy’s Utopia? It seems, if you’ll forgive me saying so, an airy-fairy kind of place. A city of dreams, with glittering spires and no reality.
A: I suspect initially about two million people. Any larger unit will be hard to organize: we depend so greatly in our existing societies upon the accumulated traditions of the past, on the habits of custom and practice, built up to our disadvantage through history, to regulate ourselves and our behaviour. And in Darcy’s Utopia we have to start again, rethink everything, from how and why we brush our teeth to how and why we bury our dead; we must do this in the light of our new knowledge of our inner world, and our new technological control over the outer one, and we must do it by consensus. Any smaller unit and the rest of the world will say oh, it only works because it’s so small, it has no relevance here.
Q: I see. The rest of the world is watching, is going to follow suit?
A: Of course. We start small, and little by little the boundaries of Darcy’s Utopia will expand. Our only problem in the end will be there’ll be nowhere to send the exiles to, but I don’t suppose we have to worry about that for a while.
Q: Supposing it doesn’t work?
A: Supposing, supposing. It may not work. But nothing else is going to be working, not for long. Look around. The poor and the dispossessed, forget the lover, are at the gate. The third world spills over into the first, the second. Your guilt will not let you be happy or at peace. The oceans warm up: the very air gets hard to breathe. So let the community of nations try it: let Europe set aside the land: let two million with a common language and a common will there congregate. Let Europe feed, house and clothe them for five years, while they get their high-technology, low-consuming, recycling act together. Europe feeds, houses and clothes its refugees: let them do it to some purpose: let us find our blueprint for the future, our multiracial, unicultural, secular society: let us locate it in the real world.
Q: Why Europe?
A: Who else is ready for the shock of the new? And because Darcy’s Utopia is built upon the resonances, if you’ll forgive me being so pompous, of the Greco-Judeo-Christian tradition: