Michael Frayn - Sweet Dreams

(But maybe those are the Bernsteins now, in that car there , crossing over the top of the Parkway on the Uptown Expressway, going not to the Chases’ at all, but to the Kessels’….)

“And of course,” adds Myra, as she looks up at the lights on the hills where the Bakers live, “Howard and Felicity.”

“I wonder,” Miriam Bernstein is saying to Jack, craning her head to look up at those same lights, “if Howard and Felicity will be there….”

Howard’s heart goes out to them — to Michael and Myra, to Jack and Miriam, to Roy and Prue — to all of them down there in the glittering darkness. From his great height in the hills he loves them and sorrows for them. For what he understands, and what they apparently do not, or will not, is that the whole lovely complex crystal machine in which they live is built upon suffering and death.

Phil was right: there is no metropolis without provinces, no administrators without administered, no doctors without disease. The flaws which they are building into the system (which even Phil is building into the system) — the endemic morbidity of man and the lethal hostility of his environment — are not incidental but essential. They are the weaknesses which can be exploited to keep men at work producing the goods which this society needs, and to keep them in subjection.

And they are all implicated. They are all working the system. Even if his New Jerusalem were ever built it would be executed and administered by the people in this city. It would be populated by Phil’s creations — patched up and improved a bit, but still the products of this same society.

And he is the only one who can see this! He himself, standing exactly here in the darkness above the city, with the night breeze ruffling his hair. Old Howard Baker, everyone’s friend, the slightly comic figure with the earnest expression on his face leading the way down the street for the rest of his body, the man who innocently believes whatever he is told, and gets everything slightly wrong.

A small noise behind him makes him turn round. Felicity is standing in the doorway of the living-room.

“What is it?” he asks.

“I was just looking at you against the lights of the city,” she says. “You’re very slightly phosphorescent.”

He puts his arm round her and goes back indoors. They take another load of accumulated junk down to the dustbins. One of the biggest items is the complete working model of their life which he bought the children for Christmas all those years ago. As he buckles it and breaks it to get it in the bin, a strange sweet sadness rises to his throat.

They are living in a ramshackle old farmhouse in the woods. Once the land round it was worked, but no one these days would break his back over soil so rocky and barren. The primeval forest has closed in again all around.

“The relief!” cries Howard, as he goes about in an old pair of jeans, mending the roof and painting the window-frames. “The sense of liberation when you really give everything up, and own nothing. I realize now that somewhere inside myself this is what I was always longing for.“

They do in fact own almost literally nothing, except the house, and a few acres of the surrounding woodland to serve as a no-man’s land between them and the world. They have a few sheep, to keep down the poison ivy, a few pigs to breed, and a dusty station wagon to take them to market.

The children run wild, in shirts and jeans.

For an hour or two each day, no more, Howard and Felicity take it in turns to teach them. They do a little arithmetic, a little Greek and Italian, a little harmony and counterpoint. They read Dante and Tacitus and Saint Augustine together, with the Authorized Version and Gibbon to develop the style. Nothing else.

The inside of the house is almost bare of furniture. Just plain white walls and stripped floors, and the simplest of old tables and chairs. Their voices ring out cheerfully from the uncluttered surfaces.

They set aside a room for Howard to work in, when he’s not labouring outside with an axe or a scythe. A table. A chair. A typewriter. He is putting a few thoughts down on paper.

Felicity bakes the bread, singing.

Once or twice a week Howard climbs into the station wagon and drives over to the little market town fifteen miles away. Buys paraffin for the lamps, flour, nails, bubblegum for the children. Picks up the mail and the newspapers. Drops into the bank.

Bees fly in through the windows on hot afternoons, zigzag across the house, and disappear through the open front door. The scent of cow-parsley in the lane is overwhelming.

The children find an injured fox cub, and rear it.

It rains. A mist of rain hangs in the tops of the trees. Howard lights a fire of the pine logs he has cut, and they sit in front of it with tumblers of neat Irish whisky. Howard has Paradise Lost open on his knee, Felicity the Faerie Queene . The children are reading old Chums annuals.

“What did we need a television set for?” demands Howard wonderingly. “Do you remember the television, children?”

The children laugh.

“There’s only one good thing about that society,” says Howard, “and that’s the opportunity it offers you to reject it.”

In this little world of sheep, pigs, bread-oven, and books, closely bounded on all sides by the surrounding woods, the whole tenor of his thinking begins to alter. He sees that the grandiose, monumental scale on which the universe is being planned is wrong in itself, even apart from the physical risks it will entail.

What’s the purpose of mountains ten and twenty thousand feet high? Of oceans three miles deep and a thousand miles across? Of miraculously complicated organisms so small that they can be seen only by a privileged elite , through microscopes costing several thousand pounds? Of vistas of stars set at distances too great for the human mind to comprehend? Of the vertiginous emptiness between and beyond the stars?

Of a universe of 000s and 000,000s and 000,000,000s — a universe of zeros?

It seems to him, as he sits in his little white room, on a plain elm chair at a plain oak table, with a view of green leaves outside the plain square window, and a plain old-fashioned black portable typewriter waiting beneath his fingers, that the purpose of all this massive display of hardware is clear: it is to overawe the minds of men and to symbolize their subjugation.

There must be a revolution. There is no other way.

The people must seize power and create their own universe. The millennium cannot be imposed on them from above.

The universe which men will create for themselves, after they have thrown off the tyranny of Phil Schaffer, Roy Chase, himself, and the rest of them, will be a very different sort of place. He envisages it in a kind of ecstasy — a world made by man, to man’s scale, for men to live in.

A world of gently undulating landscapes, made of some shock-absorbent material like foam rubber, on which it would be impossible to injure yourself.

Of oceans fresh enough to drink, too shallow to drown in, and narrow enough for children to wade across, shrimping net in hand, from Southampton to New York.

Of ice warm enough to warm the hands on.

Of air too thick for aircraft to fall out of.

Of bacteria the size of hamsters, living peaceably in imaginatively landscaped enclosures at the zoo.

A world set in a universe whose farthest reaches could be explored by any rambler with a pair of nailed boots, a packet of sandwiches, and a one-inch map.

And men must be free to create themselves. This is the keystone of his conception.

There will be no more breakable bones or shoddy arteries. No more below-average intellects. No more excuses for death.