A Coat
A Wall
The Tables
I looked over all that I wrote down yesterday and I find that
my descriptions are not sufficiently clear. That is, everything
would undoubtedly be clear to one of us but who knows to whom my
_Integral_ will some day bring these records? Perhaps you, like
our ancestors, have read the great book of civilization only up to
the page of nine hundred years ago. Perhaps you don't know even
such elementary things as the Hour Tables, Personal Hours, Maternal
Norm, Green Wall, Well-Doer. It seems droll to me and at the same
time very difficult, to explain these things. It is as though, let
us say, a writer of the twentieth century should start to explain
in his novel such words as coat, apartment, wife. Yet if his novel
had been translated for primitive races, how could he have avoided
explaining what a coat meant? I am sure that the primitive man would
look at a coat and think, "What is this for? It is only a burden,
an unnecessary burden." I am sure that you will feel the same, if I
tell you that not one of us has ever stepped beyond the Green Wall
since the Two Hundred Years' War.
But, dear readers, you must think, at least a little. It helps.
It is clear that the history of mankind as far as our knowledge
goes, is a history of the transition from nomadic forms to more
sedentary ones. Does it not follow that the most sedentary form of
life (ours) is at the same time, the most perfect one? There was a
time when people were rushing from one end of the earth to another,
but this was the prehistoric time when such things as nations, wars,
commerce, different discoveries of different Americas still existed.
Who has need of these things now?
I admit humanity acquired this habit of a sedentary form of life not
without difficulty and not at once. When the Two Hundred Years' War
had destroyed all the roads which later were overgrown with grass,
it was probably very difficult at first. It seemed uncomfortable to
live in cities which were cut off from each other by green debris.
But what of it? Man soon after he lost his tail probably did not
learn at once how to chase away flies without its help. I am almost
sure that at first he was even lonesome without his tail, but now,
can you imagine yourself with a tail? Or can you imagine yourself
walking in the street naked, without clothes? (It is possible you go
without clothes still.) Here we have the same case. I cannot imagine
a city which is not clad with a Green Wall; I cannot imagine a life
which is not clad with the figures of our Tables.
Tables.... Now even, purple figures look at me austerely yet kindly
from the golden background of the wall. Involuntarily I am reminded
of the thing which was called by the ancients, "Sainted Image," and
I feel a desire to compose verses, or prayers which are the same.
Oh, why am not I a poet, so as to be able properly to glorify the
Tables, the heart and pulse of the United State!
All of us and perhaps all of you read in childhood while in school,
that greatest of all monuments of ancient literature, the Official
Railroad Guide. But if you compare this with the Tables, you
will see side by side graphite and diamonds. Both are the same,
carbon. But how eternal, transparent, how shining the diamond!
Who does not lose his breath when he runs through the pages of
the Guide? The Tables transformed each one of us, actually, into
a six-wheeled steel hero of a great poem. Every morning with
six-wheeled precision, at the same hour, at the same minute, we wake
up, millions of us at once. At the very same hour millions like
one we begin our work, and millions like one, we finish it. United
into a single body with a million hands, at the very same second,
designated by the Tables, we carry the spoons to our mouths; at the
same second we all go out to walk, go to the auditorium, to the
halls for the Taylor exercises and then to bed.
I shall be quite frank: even we have not attained the absolute,
exact solution of the problem of happiness. Twice a day, from
sixteen to seventeen o'clock and from twenty-one to twenty-two, our
united powerful organism dissolves into separate cells; these are
the personal hours designated by the Tables. During these hours
you would see the curtains discreetly drawn in the rooms of some;
others march slowly over the pavement of the main avenue or sit at
their desks as I sit now. But I firmly believe, let them call me
an idealist and a dreamer, I believe that sooner or later we shall
somehow find even for these hours, a place in the general formula.
Somehow, all of the 86,400 seconds will be incorporated in the
Tables of Hours.
I have had opportunity to read and hear many improbable things about
those times when human beings still lived in the state of freedom,
that is, an unorganized primitive state. One thing has always
seemed to me the most improbable: how could a government, even a
primitive government, permit people to live without anything like
our Tables,--without compulsory walks, without precise regulation
of the time to eat, for instance? They would get up and go to bed
whenever they liked. Some historians even say that in those days the
streets were lighted all night; and all night people went about the
streets.
That I cannot understand; true, their minds were rather limited in
those days. Yet they should have understood, should they not, that
such a life was actually wholesale murder, although slow murder,
day after day? The State (humanitarianism) forbade in those days the
murder of one person, but it did not forbid the killing of millions
slowly and by half. To kill one, that is, to reduce the general
sum of human life by fifty years, was considered criminal, but to
reduce the general sum of human life by fifty million years was not
considered criminal! Is it not droll? Today this simple mathematical
moral problem could easily be solved in half a minute's time by any
ten-year-old Number, yet _they_ couldn't do it! All their Immanuel
Kants together couldn't do it! It didn't enter the heads of all
their Kants to build a system of scientific ethics, that is, ethics
based on adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing.
Further, is it not absurd that their State (they called it State!)
left sexual life absolutely without control? However, whenever and
as much as they wanted.... Absolutely unscientific like beasts; and
like beasts they blindly gave birth to children! Is it not strange
to understand gardening, chicken-farming, fishery (we have definite
knowledge that they were familiar with all these things), and not
to be able to reach the last step in this logical scale, namely,
production of children,--not to be able to discover such things as
Maternal and Paternal Norms?
It is so droll, so improbable, that while I write this I am afraid
lest you, my unknown future readers, should think I am merely a bad
jester. I feel almost as though you may think I simply want to mock
you and with a most serious appearance try to relate to you absolute
nonsense. But first, I am incapable of jesting, for in every joke a
lie has its hidden function. And second, the science of the United
State contends that the life of the ancients was exactly what I
am describing, and the science of the United State cannot make a
mistake! Yet how could they have State logic, since they lived in a
condition of freedom like beasts, like apes, like herds? What could
one expect of them, since even in our day one hears from time to
time, coming from the bottom, the primitive depths, the echo of the
apes?
Fortunately it happens only from time to time, very seldom. Happily
it is only a case of small parts breaking; these may easily be
repaired without stopping the eternal great march of the whole
machine. And in order to eliminate a broken peg we have the skillful
heavy hand of the Well-Doer, we have the experienced eyes of the
Guardians....
By the way, I just thought of that Number whom I met yesterday,
the double-curved one like the letter S; I think I have seen him
several times coming out of the Bureau of the Guardians. Now I
understand why I felt such an instinctive respect for him and a
kind of awkwardness when that strange I-330 at his side.... I must
confess that, that I-- ... they ring the bell, time to sleep, it is
twenty-two-thirty. Till tomorrow, then.