The Dyers Hand and Other Essays

The psychological difference between the Arcadian dreamer and the Utopian dreamer is that the backward-looking Arca­dian knows that his expulsion from Eden is an irrevocable fact and that his dream, therefore, is a wish-dream which cannot become real; in consequence, the actions which led to his expulsion are of no concern to his dream. The forward- looking Utopian, on the other hand, necessarily believes that his New Jerusalem is a dream which ought to be realized so that the actions by which it could be realized are a neces­sary element in his dream; it must include images, that is to say, not only of New Jerusalem itself but also images of the Day of Judgment.

Consequently, while neither Eden nor New Jerusalem are places where aggression can exist, the Utopian dream permits indulgence in aggressive fantasies in a way that the Arcadian dream does not. Even Hitler, I imagine, would have defined his New Jerusalem as a world where there are no Jews, not as a world where they are being gassed by the million day after day in ovens, but he was a Utopian, so the ovens had to come in.

How any individual envisages Eden is determined by his temperament, personal history and cultural milieu, but to all dream Edens the following axioms, I believe, apply.

O Eden is a world of pure being and absolute unique­ness. Change can occur but as an instantaneous trans­formation, not through, a process of becoming. Everyone is incomparable.

The self is satisfied whatever it demands; the ego is approved of whatever it chooses.

There is no distinction between the objective and the subjective. What a person appears to others to be is identi­cal with what he is to himself. His name and his clothes are as much his as his body, so that, if he changes them, he turns into someone else.

Space is both safe and free. There are walled gardens but no dungeons, open roads in all directions but no wandering in the wilderness.

Temporal novelty is without anxiety, temporal repeti­tion without boredom.

Whatever the social pattern, each member of society is satisfied according to his conception of his needs. If it is a hierarchical society, all masters are kind and generous, all servants faithful old retainers.

j) Whatever people do, whether alone or in company, is some kind of play. The only motive for an action is the pleasure it gives the actor, and no deed has a goal or an effect beyond itself.

Three kinds of erotic life are possible, though any particular dream of Eden need contain only one. The polymorphous-perverse promiscuous sexuality of child­hood, courting couples whose relation is potential, not actual, and the chastity of natural celibates who are without desire.

Though there can be no suffering or grief, there can be death. If a death occurs, it is not a cause for sorrow —the dead are not missed—but a social occasion for a lovely funeral.

The Serpent, acquaintance with whom results in immediate expulsion—any serious need or desire.

The four great English experts on Eden are Dickens, Oscar Wilde, Ronald Firbank and P. G. Wodehouse.¹

¹N. B. To my surprise, the only creators of Edens during the last three centuries I can think of, have all been English.

If, in comparing their versions of Eden with those of the Ancient World, I call theirs Christian, I am not, of course, asserting anything about their own beliefs. I only mean that their versions presuppose an anthropology for which Christianity is, historically, responsible. Whether it can exist in a society where the influence of Christianty has never been felt or has been eradicated, I do not know. I suspect that works like Pickwick Papers, The Importance of Being Earnest, The Flower Beneath the Foot, and Blandings Castle

would bewilder a Russian Communist as much as they would have bewildered an Ancient Greek. The Communist would probably say: "It is incredible that anybody should like people so silly and useless as Mr. Pickwick, Miss Prism, Madame Wetme and Bertie Wooster." The Greek would probably have said: "It is incredible that such people, so plain, middle-aged and untalented, should be happy."

When the Greeks pictured Eden, they thought of it as a place which the gods or Chance might permit to exist. In his tenth Pythian Ode, Pindar describes the life of the Hyperboreans.

Never the Muse is absent from their ways: lyres clash and the flutes cry and everywhere maiden choruses whirling. They bind their hair in golden laurel and take their holiday.

Neither disease nor bitter old age is mixed In their sacred blood; far from labor and battle they live; they escape Nemesis the overjust.