A Modern Utopia, H. G. Wells [i like reading books .txt] 📗

samurai is a transcendental and mystical God.

So far as the samurai have a purpose in common in maintaining the

State, and the order and progress of the world, so far, by their

discipline and denial, by their public work and effort, they worship

God together. But the fount of motives lies in the individual life,

it lies in silent and deliberate reflections, and at this, the most

striking of all the rules of the samurai aims. For seven consecutive

days in the year, at least, each man or woman under the Rule must go

right out of all the life of man into some wild and solitary place,

must speak to no man or woman, and have no sort of intercourse with

mankind. They must go bookless and weaponless, without pen or paper,

or money. Provisions must be taken for the period of the journey, a

rug or sleeping sack—for they must sleep under the open sky—but

no means of making a fire. They may study maps beforehand to guide

them, showing any difficulties and dangers in the journey, but

they may not carry such helps. They must not go by beaten ways or

wherever there are inhabited houses, but into the bare, quiet places

of the globe—the regions set apart for them.

 

This discipline, my double said, was invented to secure a certain

stoutness of heart and body in the members of the order, which

otherwise might have lain open to too many timorous, merely

abstemious, men and women. Many things had been suggested, swordplay

and tests that verged on torture, climbing in giddy places and the

like, before this was chosen. Partly, it is to ensure good training

and sturdiness of body and mind, but partly, also, it is to draw

their minds for a space from the insistent details of life, from the

intricate arguments and the fretting effort to work, from personal

quarrels and personal affections, and the things of the heated room.

Out they must go, clean out of the world.

 

Certain great areas are set apart for these yearly pilgrimages

beyond the securities of the State. There are thousands of square

miles of sandy desert in Africa and Asia set apart; much of the

Arctic and Antarctic circles; vast areas of mountain land and frozen

marsh; secluded reserves of forest, and innumerable unfrequented

lines upon the sea. Some are dangerous and laborious routes; some

merely desolate; and there are even some sea journeys that one may

take in the halcyon days as one drifts through a dream. Upon the

seas one must go in a little undecked sailing boat, that may be

rowed in a calm; all the other journeys one must do afoot, none

aiding. There are, about all these desert regions and along most

coasts, little offices at which the samurai says good-bye to the

world of men, and at which they arrive after their minimum time of

silence is overpast. For the intervening days they must be alone

with Nature, necessity, and their own thoughts.

 

“It is good?” I said.

 

“It is good,” my double answered. “We civilised men go back to the

stark Mother that so many of us would have forgotten were it not for

this Rule. And one thinks…. Only two weeks ago I did my journey

for the year. I went with my gear by sea to Tromso, and then inland

to a starting-place, and took my ice-axe and rucksack, and said

good-bye to the world. I crossed over four glaciers; I climbed three

high mountain passes, and slept on moss in desolate valleys. I saw

no human being for seven days. Then I came down through pine woods

to the head of a road that runs to the Baltic shore. Altogether it

was thirteen days before I reported myself again, and had speech

with fellow creatures.”

 

“And the women do this?”

 

“The women who are truly samurai—yes. Equally with the men. Unless

the coming of children intervenes.”

 

I asked him how it had seemed to him, and what he thought about

during the journey.

 

“There is always a sense of effort for me,” he said, “when I leave

the world at the outset of the journey. I turn back again and again,

and look at the little office as I go up my mountain side. The first

day and night I’m a little disposed to shirk the job—every year

it’s the same—a little disposed, for example, to sling my pack from

my back, and sit down, and go through its contents, and make sure

I’ve got all my equipment.”

 

“There’s no chance of anyone overtaking you?”

 

“Two men mustn’t start from the same office on the same route within

six hours of each other. If they come within sight of each other,

they must shun an encounter, and make no sign—unless life is in

danger. All that is arranged beforehand.”

 

“It would be, of course. Go on telling me of your journey.”

 

“I dread the night. I dread discomfort and bad weather. I only begin

to brace up after the second day.”

 

“Don’t you worry about losing your way?”

 

“No. There are cairns and skyline signs. If it wasn’t for that, of

course we should be worrying with maps the whole time. But I’m only

sure of being a man after the second night, and sure of my power to

go through.”

 

“And then?”

 

“Then one begins to get into it. The first two days one is apt to

have the events of one’s journey, little incidents of travel, and

thoughts of one’s work and affairs, rising and fading and coming

again; but then the perspectives begin. I don’t sleep much at nights

on these journeys; I lie awake and stare at the stars. About dawn,

perhaps, and in the morning sunshine, I sleep! The nights this last

time were very short, never more than twilight, and I saw the glow

of the sun always, just over the edge of the world. But I had chosen

the days of the new moon, so that I could have a glimpse of the

stars…. Years ago, I went from the Nile across the Libyan Desert

east, and then the stars—the stars in the later days of that

journey—brought me near weeping…. You begin to feel alone on the

third day, when you find yourself out on some shining snowfield, and

nothing of mankind visible in the whole world save one landmark, one

remote thin red triangle of iron, perhaps, in the saddle of the

ridge against the sky. All this busy world that has done so much and

so marvellously, and is still so little—you see it little as it

is—and far off. All day long you go and the night comes, and it

might be another planet. Then, in the quiet, waking hours, one

thinks of one’s self and the great external things, of space and

eternity, and what one means by God.”

 

He mused.

 

“You think of death?”

 

“Not of my own. But when I go among snows and desolations—and

usually I take my pilgrimage in mountains or the north—I think very

much of the Night of this World—the time when our sun will be red

and dull, and air and water will lie frozen together in a common

snowfield where now the forests of the tropics are steaming…. I

think very much of that, and whether it is indeed God’s purpose that

our kind should end, and the cities we have built, the books we have

written, all that we have given substance and a form, should lie

dead beneath the snows.”

 

“You don’t believe that?”

 

“No. But if it is not so–-. I went threading my way among gorges

and precipices, with my poor brain dreaming of what the alternative

should be, with my imagination straining and failing. Yet, in those

high airs and in such solitude, a kind of exaltation comes to

men…. I remember that one night I sat up and told the rascal stars

very earnestly how they should not escape us in the end.”

 

He glanced at me for a moment as though he doubted I should

understand.

 

“One becomes a personification up there,” he said. “One becomes the

ambassador of mankind to the outer world.

 

“There is time to think over a lot of things. One puts one’s self

and one’s ambition in a new pair of scales….

 

“Then there are hours when one is just exploring the wilderness like

a child. Sometimes perhaps one gets a glimpse from some precipice

edge of the plains far away, and houses and roadways, and remembers

there is still a busy world of men. And at last one turns one’s feet

down some slope, some gorge that leads back. You come down, perhaps,

into a pine forest, and hear that queer clatter reindeer make—and

then, it may be, see a herdsman very far away, watching you. You

wear your pilgrim’s badge, and he makes no sign of seeing

you….

 

“You know, after these solitudes, I feel just the same queer

disinclination to go back to the world of men that I feel when I

have to leave it. I think of dusty roads and hot valleys, and being

looked at by many people. I think of the trouble of working with

colleagues and opponents. This last journey I outstayed my time,

camping in the pine woods for six days. Then my thoughts came round

to my proper work again. I got keen to go on with it, and so I came

back into the world. You come back physically clean—as though you

had had your arteries and veins washed out. And your brain has been

cleaned, too…. I shall stick to the mountains now until I am old,

and then I shall sail a boat in Polynesia. That is what so many old

men do. Only last year one of the great leaders of the samurai—a

white-haired man, who followed the Rule in spite of his one hundred

and eleven years—was found dead in his boat far away from any land,

far to the south, lying like a child asleep….”

 

“That’s better than a tumbled bed,” said I, “and some boy of a

doctor jabbing you with injections, and distressful people hovering

about you.”

 

“Yes,” said my double; “in Utopia we who are samurai die better than

that…. Is that how your great men die?”

 

It came to me suddenly as very strange that, even as we sat and

talked, across deserted seas, on burning sands, through the still

aisles of forests, and in all the high and lonely places of the

world, beyond the margin where the ways and houses go, solitary men

and women sailed alone or marched alone, or clambered—quiet,

resolute exiles; they stood alone amidst wildernesses of ice, on the

precipitous banks of roaring torrents, in monstrous caverns, or

steering a tossing boat in the little circle of the horizon amidst

the tumbled, incessant sea, all in their several ways communing with

the emptiness, the enigmatic spaces and silences, the winds and

torrents and soulless forces that lie about the lit and ordered life

of men.

 

I saw more clearly now something I had seen dimly already, in the

bearing and the faces of this Utopian chivalry, a faint persistent

tinge of detachment from the immediate heats and hurries, the little

graces and delights, the tensions and stimulations of the daily

world. It pleased me strangely to think of this steadfast yearly

pilgrimage of solitude, and how near men might come then to the high

distances of God.

 

Section 8

 

After that I remember we fell talking of the discipline of the Rule,

of the Courts that try breaches of it, and interpret doubtful

cases—for, though a man may resign with due notice and be