Word: utopia
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...indeed, antiutopian-texts of the time have been Yevgeny Zamyatin's We and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. They stand in stark contrast to the visions of past ages: Plato's Republic, Augustine's City of God, Dante's Paradise, More's Utopia, Rousseau, Kant, Marx and the American Dream, which saw the millennium in everything new. No longer. Our antiutopian visions do not presume new discoveries so much as the perversion of things already known, the bleakness of these images due less to a mistrust of science than of basic human nature...
...have grown from the awareness that a Utopia can no longer be isolated, as it was with Plato and More, and that any future view must by necessity account for a universe of differences on an interconnected planet. Or perhaps we have come to dissociate knowledge from progress-a faith in progress being essential to Utopian thought-seeing instead every recent advance of the mind as merely one step, neither forward nor backward, along a huge, pitiless circle...
...most people find it unhealthy to dwell in dreamland, very few people wish to believe in wholly dark visions either, not only because such visions run counter to human buoyancy, bul because one cannot stare indefinitely at broken objects without feeling an urge to mend them. History encompasses neither utopia nor hell. It squats like a bear and dares the world to move it No visions of light or darkness are necessary. Only a steady concentration on the world we made, and will make again-this year, next year and the year after...
...laws, rhythms and mysteries of nature and happiest if they live in harmony with it, and their dwellings should reflect this unity inside and out. Wright's canon of organic design (which, being a loquacious and somewhat argumentative man, he often confused and even contradicted) is no Thoreauvian Utopia. He shared the American faith of his time in the blessings of technology. "This thing we call the Machine," he said in 1901, "is no more or less than the principle of organic growth working irresistibly the Will of Life through the medium of Man." But machine products, he believed...
PATIENCE is one of Gilbert and Sullivan's humbler operettas. It falls somewhere between the brilliant hilarity of HMS pinafore and the insipid mundaneness of the dusty Utopia Limited; it isn't set in Japan or in a mystical land. Patience unfolds somewhere in England in a town besieged by the pretentious aesthetic movement which transforms love into a selfish expression. Although Patiences plot does not mesmerize us with Gilberth and Sullivan's usual riveting complexity neither does it let us down. Cleverly worded lyrics complement attractive melodies pleasantly echoing grander numbers in other grander shows...