The World Set Free, H. G. Wells [ereader for textbooks .txt] 📗

had scarcely begun.⁠ ⁠… Nineveh, Babylon, Athens, Syracuse, Alexandria, these were the first rough experiments in association that made a security, a breathing-space, in which inquiry was born. Man had to experiment before he found out the way to begin. But already two hundred years ago he had fairly begun.⁠ ⁠… The politics and dignities and wars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were only the last phoenix blaze of the former civilisation flaring up about the beginnings of the new. Which we serve.

“Man lives in the dawn forever,” said Karenin. “Life is beginning and nothing else but beginning. It begins everlastingly. Each step seems vaster than the last, and does but gather us together for the nest. This Modern State of ours, which would have been a Utopian marvel a hundred years ago, is already the commonplace of life. But as I sit here and dream of the possibilities in the mind of man that now gather to a head beneath the shelter of its peace, these great mountains here seem but little things.⁠ ⁠…”

§ VI

About eleven Karenin had his midday meal, and afterwards he slept among his artificial furs and pillows for two hours. Then he awoke and some tea was brought to him, and he attended to a small difficulty in connection with the Moravian schools in the Labrador country and in Greenland that Gardener knew would interest him. He remained alone for a little while after that, and then the two women came to him again. Afterwards Edwards and Kahn joined the group, and the talk fell upon love and the place of women in the renascent world. The cloudbanks of India lay under a quivering haze, and the blaze of the sun fell full upon the eastward precipices. Ever and again as they talked, some vast splinter of rock would crack and come away from these, or a wild rush of snow and ice and stone, pour down in thunder, hang like a wet thread into the gulfs below, and cease.⁠ ⁠…

§ VII

For a time Karenin said very little, and Kahn, the popular poet, talked of passionate love. He said that passionate, personal love had been the abiding desire of humanity since ever humanity had begun, and now only was it becoming a possible experience. It had been a dream that generation after generation had pursued, that always men had lost on the verge of attainment. To most of those who had sought it obstinately it had brought tragedy. Now, lifted above sordid distresses, men and women might hope for realised and triumphant love. This age was the Dawn of Love.⁠ ⁠…

Karenin remained downcast and thoughtful while Kahn said these things. Against that continued silence Kahn’s voice presently seemed to beat and fail. He had begun by addressing Karenin, but presently he was including Edith Haydon and Rachel Borken in his appeal. Rachel listened silently; Edith watched Karenin, and very deliberately avoided Kahn’s eyes.

“I know,” said Karenin at last, “that many people are saying this sort of thing. I know that there is a vast release of lovemaking in the world. This great wave of decoration and elaboration that has gone about the world, this Efflorescence, has, of course, laid hold of that. I know that when you say that the world is set free, you interpret that to mean that the world is set free for lovemaking. Down there⁠—under the clouds, the lovers foregather. I know your songs, Kahn, your half-mystical songs, in which you represent this old hard world dissolving into a luminous haze of love⁠—sexual love.⁠ ⁠… I don’t think you are right or true in that. You are a young, imaginative man, and you see life⁠—ardently⁠—with the eyes of youth. But the power that has brought man into these high places under this blue-veiled blackness of the sky and which beckons us on towards the immense and awful future of our race, is riper and deeper and greater than any such emotions.⁠ ⁠…

“All through my life⁠—it has been a necessary part of my work⁠—I have had to think of this release of sexual love and the riddles that perfect freedom and almost limitless power will put to the soul of our race. I can see now, all over the world, a beautiful ecstasy of waste: ‘Let us sing and rejoice and be lovely and wonderful.’⁠ ⁠… The orgy is only beginning, Kahn.⁠ ⁠… It was inevitable⁠—but it is not the end of mankind.⁠ ⁠…

“Think what we are. It is but a yesterday in the endlessness of time that life was a dreaming thing, dreaming so deeply that it forgot itself as it dreamt, its lives, its individual instincts, its moments were born and wondered and played and desired and hungered and grew weary and died. Incalculable successions of vision, visions of sunlit jungle, river wilderness, wild forest, eager desire, beating hearts, soaring wings and creeping terror flamed hotly and then were as though they had never been. Life was an uneasiness across which lights played and vanished. And then we came, man came, and opened eyes that were a question and hands that were a demand and began a mind and memory that dies not when men die, but lives and increases forever, an over-mind, a dominating will, a question and an aspiration that reaches to the stars.⁠ ⁠… Hunger and fear and this that you make so much of, this sex, are but the elementals of life out of which we have arisen. All these elementals, I grant you, have to be provided for, dealt with, satisfied, but all these things have to be left behind.”

“But Love,” said Kahn.

“I speak of sexual love and the love of intimate persons. And that is what you mean, Kahn.”

Karenin shook his head. “You cannot stay at the roots and climb the tree,” he said.⁠ ⁠…

“No,” he said after a pause, “this sexual excitement, this love story, is just a part of growing up and we grow out of it. So far literature and art and sentiment and