They were not simple folk, you see, though they were happy.
But we do not say the words of cheer much any more. All smiles have
become archaic. Given a description such as this one tends to make
certain assumptions. Given a description such as this one tends
to look next for the King, mounted on a splendid stallion and surrounded
by his noble knights, or perhaps in a golden litter borne by great-muscled
slaves. But there was no king. They did not use swords, or keep
slaves. They were not barbarians, I do not know the rules and laws
of their society, but I suspect that they were singularly few. As
they did without monarchy and slavery, so they also got on without
the stock exchange, the advertisement, the secret police, and the
bomb. Yet I repeat that these were not simple folk, not dulcet shepherds,
noble savages, bland utopians. They were not less complex than us.
The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and
sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid.
Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason
of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible
boredom of pain. If you can't lick 'em, join 'em. If it hurts, repeat
it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence
is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we
can no longer describe a happy man, nor make any celebration of
joy. How can I tell you about the people of Omelas? They were not
näive and happy children-though their children were, in fact,
happy. They were mature, intelligent, passionate adults whose lives
were not wretched. O miracle! But I wish I could describe it better.
I wish I could convince you. Omelas sounds in my words like a city
in a fairy tale, long ago and far away, once upon a time. Perhaps
it would be best if you imagined it as your own fancy bids, assuming
it will rise to the occasion, for certainly I cannot suit you all.
For instance, how about technology? I think that there would be
no cars or helicopters in and above the streets; this follows from
the fact that the people of Omelas are happy people. Happiness is
based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither
necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive. In the middle
category, however-that of the unnecessary but undestructive, that
of comfort, luxury, exuberance, etc.-they could perfectly well have
central heating, subway trains, washing machines, and all kinds
of marvelous devices not yet invented here, floating lightsources,
fuelless power, a cure for the common cold. Or they could have none
of that: it doesn't matter. As you like it. I incline to think that
people form towns up and down the coast have been coming in to Omelas
during the last days before the Festival on very fast little trains
and double-decked trams, and that the train station of Omelas is
actually the handsomest building in town, though plainer than the
magnificent Farmers' Market. But even granted trains, I fear that
Omelas so far strikes some of you as goody-goody. Smiles, bells,
parades, horses, bleh. If so, please add an orgy. If an orgy would
help, don't hesitate. Let us not, however, have temples from which
issue beautiful nude priests and priestesses already half in ecstasy
and ready to copulate with any man or woman, lover or stranger,
who desires union with the deep godhead of the blood, although that
was my first idea. But really it would be better not to have any
temples in Omelas-at least, not manned temples. Religion yes, clergy
no. Surely the beautiful nudes can just wander about, offering themselves
like divine soufflés to the hunger of the needy and the rapture
of the flesh. Let them join the processions. Let tambourines be
struck above the copulations, and the glory of desire be proclaimed
upon the gongs, and (a not unimportant point) let the offspring
of these delightful rituals be beloved and looked after by all.
One thing I know there is none of in Omelas is guilt. But what else
should there be? I thought at first there were no drugs, but that
is puritanical. For those who like it, the faint insistent sweetness
of drooz may perfume the ways of the city, drooz which first brings
a great lightness and brilliance to the mind and limbs, and then
after some hours a dreamy languor, and wonderful visions at last
of the very arcana and inmost secrets of the Universe, as well as
exciting the pleasure of sex beyond all belief, and it is not habit-forming.
For more modest tastes I think there ought to be beer. What else,
what else belongs in the joyous city? The sense of victory, surely,
the celebration of courage. But as we did without clergy, let us
do without soldiers. The joy built upon successful slaughter is
not the right kind of joy; it will not do; it is fearful and it
is trivial. A boundless and generous contentment, a magnanimous
triumph felt not against some outer enemy but in communion with
the finest and fairest in the souls of all men everywhere and the
splendor of the world's summer: this is what swells the hearts of
the people of Omelas, and the victory they celebrate is that of
life. I really don't think many of them need to take drooz.
Most of the processions have reached the Green Fields by
now. A marvelous smell of cooking goes forth from the red and blue
tents of the provisioners. The faces of small children are amiably
sticky; in the benign gray beard of a man a couple of crumbs of
rich pastry are entangled. The youths and girls have mounted their
horses and are beginning to group around the starting line of the
course. An old woman, small, fat, and laughing, is passing out flowers
from a basket, and tall young men wear her flowers in their shining
hair. A child of nine or ten sits at the edge of the crowd, alone,
playing on a wooden flute. People pause to listen, and they smile,
but they do not speak to him, for he never ceases playing and never
sees them, his dark eyes wholly rapt in the sweet, thin magic of
the tune.
He finishes, and slowly lowers his hands holding the wooden
flute.
As if that little private silence were the signal, all at
once a trumpet sounds from the pavilion near the starting line:
imperious, melancholy, piercing. The horses rear on their slender
legs, and some of them neigh in answer. Sober-faced, the young riders
stroke the horses' necks and soothe them, whispering, "Quiet, quiet,
there my beauty, my hope. . . . " They begin to form in rank along
the starting line. The crowds along the racecourse are like a field
of grass and flowers in the wind. The festival of Summer has begun.
Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the
joy? No? Then let me describe one more thing.
In a basement under one of the beautiful public buildings
of Omelas, or perhaps in the cellar of one of its spacious private
homes, there is a room. It has one locked door, and no window. A
little light seeps in dustily between cracks in the boards, secondhand
from a cobwebbed window somewhere across the cellar. In one corner
of the little room a couple of mops, with stiff, clotted, foul-smelling
heads, stand near a rusty bucket. The floor is dirt, a little damp
to the touch, as cellar dirt usually is. The room is about three
paces long and two wide: a mere broom closet or disused tool room.
In the room a child is sitting. It could be a boy or a girl. It
looks about six, but actually is nearly ten. It is feeble-minded.
Perhaps it was born defective, or perhaps it has become imbecile
through fear, malnutrition, and neglect. It picks its nose and occasionally
fumbles vaguely with its toes or genitals, as it sits hunched in
the corner farthest from the bucket and the two mops. It is afraid
of the mops. It finds them horrible. It shuts its eyes, but it knows
the mops are still standing there; and the door is locked; and nobody
will come. The door is always locked; and nobody ever comes, except
that sometimes-the child has no understanding of time or interval-sometimes
the door rattles terribly and opens, and a person, or several people,
are there. One of them may come in and kick the child to make it
stand up. The others never come close, but peer in at it with frightened,
disgusted eyes. The food bowl and the water jug are hastily filled,
the door is locked; the eyes disappear. The people at the door never
say anything, but the child, who has not always lived in the tool
room, and can remember sunlight and its mother's voice, sometimes
speaks. "I will be good," it says. "Please let me out. I will be
good!" They never answer. The child used to scream for help at night,
and cry a good deal, but now it only makes a kind of whining, "eh-haa,
eh-haa", and it speaks less and less often. It is so thin there
are no calves to its legs, its belly protrudes; it lives on a half-bowl
of corn meal and grease a day. It is naked. Its buttocks and things
are a mass of festered sores, as it sits in its own excrement continually.
They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas. Some
of them have come to see it, others are content merely to know it
is there. They all know that it has to be there. Some of them understand
why, and some do not, but they all understand that their happiness,
the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the
health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill
of there makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly
weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child's abominable
misery.
This is usually explained to children when they are between
eight and twelve, whenever they seem capable of understanding; and
most of those who come to see the child are young people, though
often enough an adult comes, or comes back, to see the child. No
matter how well the matter has been explained to them, these young
spectators are always shocked and sickened at the sight. They feel
disgust, which they had thought themselves superior to. They feel
anger, outrage, impotence, despite all the explanations. They would
like to do something for the child. But there is nothing they can
do. If the child were brought up into the sunlight out of that vile
place, if it were cleaned and fed and comforted that would be a
good thing, indeed; but if it were done, in that day and hour all
the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would wither and
be destroyed. Those are the terms. To exchange all the goodness
and grace of every life in Omelas for that single, small improvement:
to throw away the happiness of thousands for the chance of the happiness
of one: that would be to let guilt within the walls indeed.
The terms are strict and absolute; there may not even be
a kind word spoken to the child.
Often the young people go home in tears, or in a tearless
rage, when they have seen the child and faced this terrible paradox.
They may brood over it for weeks or years. But as time goes on they
begin to realize that even if the child could be released, it would
not get much good of its freedom: a little vague pleasure of warmth
and food, no doubt, but little more. It is too degraded and imbecile
to know any real joy. It has been afraid too long ever to be free
of fear. Its habits are too uncouth for it to respond to humane
treatment. Indeed, after so long it would probably be wretched without
walls about it to protect it, and darkness for its eyes, and its
own excrement to sit in. Their tears at the bitter injustice dry
when they begin to perceive the terrible justice of reality, and
to accept it. Yet it is their tears and anger, the trying of their
generosity and the acceptance of their helplessness, which are perhaps
the true source of the splendor of their lives. Theirs is no vapid,
irresponsible happiness. They know that they, like the child, are
not free. They know compassion. It is the existence of the child,
and their knowledge of its existence, that makes possible the nobility
of their architecture, the poignancy of their music, the profundity
of their science. It is because of the child that they are so gentle
with children. They know that if the wretched one were not there
sniveling in the dark, the other one, the flute-player, could make
no joyful music as the young riders line up in their beauty for
the race in the sunlight of the first morning of summer.
Now do you believe in them? Are they not more credible? But
there is one more thing to tell and this is quiet incredible.
At times one of the adolescent girls or boys who go home
to weep or rage, does not, in fact, go home at all. Sometimes also
a man or woman much older falls silent for a day or two, and then
leaves home. These people go out into the street, and walk down
the street alone. They keep walking and walk straight out of the
city of Omelas, through the beautiful gates. They keep walking across
the farmlands of Omelas. Each one goes alone, youth or girl, man
or woman. Night falls; the traveler must pass down village streets,
between the houses with yellow-lit windows, and on out into the
darkness of the fields. Each alone, they go west or north, towards
the mountains. They go on. They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into
the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards
is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness.
I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist.
But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away
from Omelas. |
