Word: walden
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...number and stature. Often he has failed to understand them. Sometimes he has even branded them as neurotic or even psychotic. Occasionally he has seemed to imply that he himself is beyond criticism. "When I met him, he was convinced he was a genius," Yvonne Skinner remembers. And in Walden Two, Skinner's alter ego Frazier, assuming the posture of Christ on the cross, says that there is "a curious similarity" between himself and God?adding, however, that "perhaps I must yield to God in point of seniority...
...another Walden Two passage, Skinner sketches a more realistic self-portrait. With some bitterness, his alter ego Frazier addresses Burris: "You think I'm conceited, aggressive, tactless, selfish. You're convinced that I'm completely insensitive to my effect upon others, except when the effect is calculated. You can't see in me any personal warmth. You're sure that I'm one who couldn't possibly be a genuine member of any community . . . Shall we say that as a person I'm a complete failure and have done with...
This awareness that he is unfit for communal life may be one reason that Skinner has never tried to start a real Walden Two, never sent a Dear-President-Mittelbach telegram to the president of Harvard. In addition, he likes his own kind of life too well to give it up even for an ideal in which he believes so intensely, and even if he felt otherwise, his wife is opposed to the idea...
Says Yvonne Skinner, a former University of Chicago English major who studied with Thornton Wilder and is herself a gifted writer: "We had tremendous arguments about Walden Two. I wouldn't like it; I just like change and privacy...
...first glance, it looks like a movie set for Walden Two. There is a shop building called Harmony, a farmhouse called Llano, and a dormitory called Oneida. Bulletin boards list upcoming cultural events, and young people lounge on hammocks, reading and engaging in serious discussions. The smell of farm-fresh cooking is everywhere. The resemblance to Walden Two is more than superficial. Twin Oaks, a 123-acre farm commune nestled in the foothills of Virginia's Piedmont, is a remarkable attempt to create a Utopian community governed by Skinner's laws of social engineering...