Читать книгу Afternoons in Utopia: Tales of the New Time - Стивен Ликок - Страница 5

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After reading about the Dear Old Utopia of the preceding chapter, the reader ought in fairness to sit down and take a breath and think about it. He might even eat something. He will see on a little reflection that the trouble with this dear old Orthodox Utopia is that it is altogether too comprehensible. You can understand it. It may be marvellous, no doubt it is, but after all it is terribly like the world in which we live. The real Utopia, if we could get a look at it, would be quite incomprehensible; we simply wouldn’t understand what the people were talking about. Neither could they explain it all, as the Dr. Ooms do in the sham Utopias, because they wouldn’t understand what it was that we didn’t understand. Anyone who has ever tried to explain to an intelligent Eskimo the operation of the New York Stock Exchange will know just what I mean. Few people perhaps have had that experience. But anybody who has undertaken to describe the nature of the photo-electric cell to an Equatorial African pygmy will understand the case exactly.

Well, then—let’s get back and see the rest; let us take a look at the Real Utopia.

In other words, let us suppose that we could really look ahead and see, not this venerable being with whiskers, but the real world of tomorrow. Let us suppose that we fall asleep for a hundred years and then wake up and sit up and see. Or no—don’t let’s even fall asleep. Let us simply take a look right now at a family group in Utopia. There they are, apparently a mother and two children, seated at breakfast. Breakfast, yes—it looks like breakfast. Some of the things at the little table look a little queer (we’ve never seen a coffee-gun, of course, or a synthetic egg)—still, it must be breakfast. There, they’re beginning to talk—listen.