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I seldom interrupted him, and I think he soon forgot that I was there. He had come to me that night in a panic, for reasons which will he given later and I, in trying to reassure him, had reminded him of that day, when the world was suddenly Utopia. "That did exist, that world," I said. "And once having existed it cannot now be dead. Believe, believe that it will come back." "Come back!"
For that reason, I never trouble my head for a moment when people object to me that this, that, or the other petty point of detail in Bellamy's Utopia or William Morris's Utopia, or my own little private and particular Utopia, is impossible, or unrealisable, or wicked, or hateful.
From these I propose to compile a very grand Work, which shall not be inferior to Utopia, Carimania, Guttiverania, Art of Flogging, Daily Journal, Epigrams on the Dunciad, or Oratory Transactions." ... Although the author of "Utopia" and "Carimania" was pilloried in good company, she suffered more than she deserved.
Yes, I was walking in Utopia, a nightmare at the end of man's long dream Utopia Black Utopia City of Endless Night diabolically compounded of the three elements of civilization in which the Germans had always been supreme imperialism, science and socialism. I had returned from my adventure on the labour levels in a mood of sombre depression.
Surely, surely, in the end, by degrees, and steps, something of this sort, some such understanding, as this Utopia must come. First here, then there, single men and then groups of men will fall into line not indeed with my poor faulty hesitating suggestions but with a great and comprehensive plan wrought out by many minds and in many tongues.
Inevitably such an order must have first arisen among a clash of social forces and political systems as a revolutionary organisation. It must have set before itself the attainment of some such Utopian ideal as this modern Utopia does, in the key of mortal imperfection, realise.
"I do not wonder," said he, "that it appears so to you, since you have no notion, or at least no right one, of such a constitution; but if you had been in Utopia with me, and had seen their laws and rules, as I did, for the space of five years, in which I lived among them, and during which time I was so delighted with them that indeed I should never have left them if it had not been to make the discovery of that new world to the Europeans, you would then confess that you had never seen a people so well constituted as they."
The mite of philosophy with which he excused himself for giving way to the urgent demand of his friends is as follows: "Human nature is easier to persuade to mount upwards than to remain on the common level." His mind, as will appear, was essentially of the strictly practical cast. He no doubt believed with Macaulay that "one acre in Middlesex is worth a principality in Utopia."
It is in this mimicry that the philosophical key to the whole movie rests. A Utopia cannot be faked. Captain Nemo's utopian underwater city was a real Utopia because everyone knew everything about it. The Utopia came closest to extinction when a group of stray survivors of a maritime accident were imprisoned in it against their expressed will. In the absence of choice, no utopia can exist.
Indeed, I was more than a little preoccupied and inattentive. The religion of the samurai was after my heart, and it had taken hold of me very strongly.... But presently I fell questioning him upon the complications that arise in the Modern Utopia through the differences between the races of men, and found my attention returning.
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