Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [252]
“Do you resent that?” I said.
“What? No. No, of course not. I was just asking something. Take marriage, say. Is that such a success story? Why not try a new way? Or look at your grandfather. Is this manifesto so different from the come-on he wrote for the Idaho Mining and Irrigation Company, except that he was doing it for profit? He was trying something that was pretty sure to fail, wasn’t he? Maybe it wasn’t even sound, maybe that sagebrush desert might better have been left in sagebrush, isn’t that what you think? All that big dream of his was dubious ecology, and sort of greedy when you look at it, just another piece of American continent-busting. But you admire your grandfather more than anybody, even though the civilization he was trying to build was this cruddy one we’ve got. Here’s a bunch of people willing to put their lives on the line to try to make a better one. Why put them down?”
“Look, Shelly,” I said, “I didn’t start this discussion. It doesn’t make that much difference to me what they do. You asked me what I thought.”
“I’d really like to know.”
“Is that it?” I said. “I thought you were trying to convert me. That’d be hopeless. I wouldn’t live in a colony like that, myself, for a thousand dollars an hour. I wouldn’t want it next door. I’m not too happy it’s within ten miles.”
“Why?”
“Why? Because their soft-headedness irritates me. Because their beautiful thinking ignores both history and human nature. Because they’d spoil my thing with their thing. Because I don’t think any of them is wise enough to play God and create a human society. Look. I like privacy, I don’t like crowds, I don’t like noise, I don’t like anarchy, I don’t even like discussion all that much. I prefer study, which is very different from meditation–not better, different. I don’t like children who are part of the wild life. So are polecats and rats and other sorts of hostile and untrained vermin. I want to make a distinction between civilization and the wild life. I want a society that will protect the wild life without confusing itself with it”
“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