Utopia, Unlimited

New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 130, 19 December 1941, Page 5

Utopia, Unlimited

’M sure you, too, in the middle of your daily drudgery, find yourself dreaming dreams of a lovely new world. If we never did so, our lives would be drab indeed. And, if you ask me what’s the use of dreaming dreams that may never come true, then I ask you, in my turn, what would be left in life if we gave up dreaming such dreams? Hard facts are so uncomfortably hard-intolerably hard-that life lived on facts alone would be like having always to sleep on bare boards without a mattress. Dreams are splendid things to live with-

and there’s always the possibility that they may come true. This particular dream will come true, I’m sure of that-I mean, the dream of a brave new world in which dictators are just hobgoblins of the pasta world in which no one has to be afraid of the coming of a bomb that can in a moment wreck their homes, rob them of their loved ones, leave their lives desolate. In this splendid world, men, women and children everywhere are free, with a real free- . dom that the world hasn’t known before-a life out of which many more tyrannies haye been taken than even those awful ones brought by the dictators. In my world, you see, there is more than enough for everybody, and the puzzle how to make "things go round, how to have them properly distributed-all that’s been solved. I dream of a world in which there’s work to be done-one couldn’t live without work-but not too much. Just enough to keep us from getting slack and lazy-but not enough of the trivial round, the common task to make it impossible for me to do all the other things that I do so want to do.-(" Between Ourselves: In Praise of Dreams." Mrs, Mary Scott, 4YA, November 19.)