The Oasis

Read The Oasis for Free Online

Book: Read The Oasis for Free Online
Authors: Mary McCarthy
Tags: Fiction, Classics, Satire, Dystopian
inclined to sloth. As realists, however, they were in no position to assert that the office self they presented, made up as it was simply of actions, was false to the inner picture. These tribulations had decidedly soured their tempers, and the compromises they had made in adjusting themselves to the “realities” of capitalism appeared to them sometimes in the light of a supreme sacrifice, a sacrifice quite unappreciated by Macdermott and his circle of irresponsible moralists, toward whom despite nominal friendship they felt a slow and vengeful anger like the rancor of the veteran toward the artful draft dodger.
    Thus their wish to see Utopia fail was sincere and even righteous; they looked forward to its debacle with a true Old Testament fervor and were prepared to go down themselves, like Samson with the temple of the Philistines, in vindication of the reality principle which remained the sole justification of their otherwise miscalculated lives. At the same time, they wished to do nothing to provoke the disaster which they foresaw; asense of fair play, a feeling for scientific method which made them look on Utopia as an experiment which must be conducted under rigidly controlled conditions in order that the outcome they predicted should appear as the inevitable result, resolved them to give the colony the benefit of the doubt, to behave toward it peaceably and co-operatively, and not get the name of obstructionists. The very caution of this reasoning edged the door ajar to salvation, but only the purists discerned this and rejoiced at their opponents’ error. The point eluded Will Taub, who had persuaded himself that he was entering Utopia in a spirit of adamant skepticism, and had stipulated nothing more than to be on his good behavior at the preliminary council meetings. That this formula represented for him at that moment the zenith of ethical strivings, he was not aware, but sometimes, during a council meeting, shooting a suspicious glance at the demure and earnest face of one of his allies, Taub could not be sure that he was not the dupe and that his whole faction had not bamboozled him and gone over to the purist side. And even in himself he discovered a certain mood of armistice which confirmed his alarms and which at the same time was not displeasing to him—a sense of generosity and of the protocol of forbearance. He participated in the forms of equity with increasing confidence, and though of course he did not take any of it seriously , his heavy and rather lowering nature performed the unaccustomed libertarian movements with a feeling of real sprightliness and wonderingself-admiration, as if he had been learning to dance. He did not encourage his wife to attend these council meetings and, coming home in the evenings, spoke of what had passed with a brief snort of disparagement; from this she was able to perceive that his emotions had become involved.
    On the day set for the great migration, therefore, the Utopian prospect looked brighter than an outsider might have supposed. The party of mechanized pilgrims guiding their family cars up the rutted road to Utopia was by no means entirely composed of the two factions, but included an assortment of persons of diffuse and uncommitted goodwill, two editors of a national news weekly, a Latinist teacher of boys who practiced a Benedictine Catholicism, an unemployed veteran of the Second World War, a girl student, a Protestant clergyman, a trade union publicist, several New York high-school teachers, an alcoholic woman illustrator, an unmarried private secretary who would organize games for the children, a middle-aged poet who had once been a Southern agrarian, an actor and a radio script-writer whom no one could remember voting for. All these, together with their husbands and wives, made up the Utopian center, voting sometimes with the realists and sometimes with the purists, inclining, naturally enough, a little to the purist side (otherwise they would hardly have

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