The child left, and Nella addressed the others:
“Listen, children, please leave us alone now. Our guest can hardly find it pleasant to have hundreds of children’s eyes goggling at him. Just imagine, Elvi, that a whole crowd of foreigners like him were staring at you. What would you do?”
“I’d run away,” bravely answered the nearest little boy she had named. And all the children immediately ran off laughing. We went out into the garden.
“Yes, well, there you can see that the legacy of the past is very powerful,” said the educator with a smile. “Our communism seems to be complete; we almost never have to deny the children anything. Where could a sense of private ownership possibly come from? Yet a child will suddenly come along and start talking about ‘my’ boat, ‘the one I made myself/Such things happen very often, and sometimes they can even end in fights. There is no helping it; according to a universal law of life the development of the organism repeats in abbreviated form the development of the species. Analogously, the development of the individual repeats that of society. The process whereby most children in the intermediate and upper age-groups establish their self-identity often assumes such vaguely individualistic forms. The approach of sexual maturity at first intensifies that element even more. Not until adolescence is the social environment finally able to conquer the vestiges of the past.”
“Do you acquaint the children with the past?” I asked.
“Of course, and they are very fond of hearing and discussing stories about bygone times. At first we give them fairy tales, beautiful and somewhat frightening fairy tales about another world that is distant and strange but whose pictures of struggle and violence awaken vague responses in the atavistic depths of the child’s instincts. It is not until later, when the child has overcome the remnants of the past in himself, that he learns to grasp the temporal connection more clearly. The images and fairy tales then become real history for him and are transformed into living links in a living chain.”
We strolled along the lanes of a spacious garden. From time to time we came upon groups of children playing, digging canals, working with handicrafts, building arbors, or simply talking animatedly among themselves. They all turned to look at me with curiosity, but none of them followed us. Evidently they had all been told not to. Most of the groups we met were of mixed ages, and there were one or two adults in many of them.
“There are quite a few educators in your colony,” I remarked. “Yes, especially if you count all the older children, which one really should do. But we have only three professionally trained educators here. Most of the other adults you see are mothers and fathers who are visiting us to be with their children, or young people interested in becoming educators.”
“Do you mean that parents can move in here to live with their children?”
“Yes, of course, and some of the mothers stay on for several years. Most, however, come to visit for a week, two weeks, perhaps a month. Even fewer fathers live here. In our colony there are sixty separate rooms for parents and for children who want privacy, and as far as I can remember these rooms have always been quite sufficient.”
“In other words, sometimes even the children would rather not live together with the collective.”
“Yes, often the older children prefer to live separately. This is partly due to the vague individualism I was telling you about and partly, especially in the case of children with a strong aptitude for scientific pursuits, it simply reflects a desire to get away from everything that might distract or disturb them. After all, many adults also like to live alone. Most of them are people who are deeply engrossed in scientific research or artistic creation.”
At this moment we noticed a child on the small field in front of us—I would say he was six or seven—who was chasing some sort of animal with a stick. We quickened our pace; the child did not see us. Just as we approached him he caught his quarry, an animal resembling a large frog, and dealt it a heavy blow with his stick. The creature slowly crawled off across the grass with a broken paw.
“Why did you do that, Aldo?” Nella asked him calmly.
“I couldn’t catch it, it kept running away,” explained the little boy.
“Do you know what you have done? You have broken the frog’s leg and caused it pain. Give me the stick and I will show you what I mean.”
The boy gave Nella the cane, and with a flick of her wrist she rapped him sharply on the hand.
“Does it hurt, Aldo?” Nella asked him in the same calm tone of voice.
“Yes! A lot! Naughty Nella!” he answered.
“You hit the frog even harder. I only bruised your hand, but you broke its leg. Not only is the frog in more pain than you, but now it cannot run and jump, it won’t be able to find food and will die of hunger. Or else it won’t be able to run away from the other mean animals, and they will eat it up. What do you think about that, Aldo?”
The boy stood in silence with tears of pain in his eyes, holding his bruised hand in the other. But he was thinking. After a moment he answered: “We have to fix its leg.”
“Exactly,” said Netti. “Come here and I will show you how.”
They captured the animal, which had only managed to crawl a few paces. Netti took out his handkerchief and tore it into strips. Aldo followed his instructions and brought him some slivers of wood. Then both of them, with the gravity of children engrossed in something extremely important, set about bandaging the broken leg of the frog in a splint.
Soon Netti and I began thinking about going home.
“Incidentally,” Nella suddenly remembered, “this evening you have a chance to see your old friend Enno. He is coming here to lecture to the older children on the planet Venus.”
“I see. So he lives here in the city?” I asked.
“No, the observatory where he works is three hours from here. But he is very fond of children and has never forgotten old Nella, his former teacher. So he visits us often, and always has something interesting to tell the children.”
That evening, of course, we returned to the Children’s Colony at the appointed hour and proceeded to a large auditorium. All except the youngest children and a few dozen adults were already gathered there. Enno greeted me warmly.
“It almost seems as though I had you in mind when I chose the theme of my lecture,” he joked. “You are saddened by the backwardness of your planet and the maliciousness of your humanity. I shall be talking about a planet where the highest forms of life at present are dinosaurs and flying lizards, whose manners are even worse than those of your bourgeoisie. Coal is not blazing in the furnaces of capitalism there, but is still growing in the form of gigantic forests. Shall we go hunting ichthyosauruses sometime? They are the local Rothschilds and Rockefellers—much gentler than the Earthly variety, of course, but then they are also far less cultivated. Life there is on a level of primary accumulation which your Marx neglects to mention in his Capital Well, I notice Nella is frowning at my idle chatter, so I shall get on with my lecture.”
Enno gave a fascinating account of the distant planet, its deep, storm-tossed oceans and towering mountains, its scorching sun and thick white clouds, terrible hurricanes and thunderstorms, grotesque monsters and majestic giant plants. He illustrated his lecture with moving pictures on a screen which took up an entire wall of the auditorium. Enno’s voice was the only sound to be heard in the darkness; the audience was plunged into deep concentration. As he was describing the adventures of the first voyagers to Venus and telling how one of them had killed a giant lizard with a hand grenade, however, I witnessed an odd little scene which hardly anyone else noticed. Aldo, who had kept close to Nella the whole while, suddenly started crying.
“What’s the matter?” she asked, bending over him.
“I feel sorry for the monster. He got hurt and died,” the boy answered quietly.
Nella embraced him and began explaining something to him in a low voice, but it was some time before he calmed down.
Enno went on
to tell about the incalculable natural resources of this splendid planet—giant waterfalls whose energy could be measured in hundreds of millions of horsepower, precious metals lying right at the surface in the mountains, enormously rich deposits of radium at a depth of just a few hundred meters, stores of energy that would last for hundreds of thousands of years. I did not yet speak the language well enough to be able to appreciate the beauty of Enno’s descriptions, but I was as enthralled as the children by the pictures he painted. When he had finished and the lights went up, I even felt a little sad—like a child who has just heard the end of a beautiful fairy tale.
The lecture was followed by questions and objections from the audience. The questions were as varied as the listeners, concerning both details in the nature of Venus and the methods of conquering it. Someone asked how long it would take for human life to evolve on the planet, and what people would have to be like physically. The objections, mostly naïve but some of them fairly penetrating, were mainly aimed at Enno’s conclusion that at present Venus was very inhospitable and that it would be a long time before her enormous riches could be exploited to any meaningful degree. The young optimists in the audience protested vigorously against these views, which, however, were shared by most Martian scientists. Enno pointed out a number of negative factors: the hot sun and the humid, bacteria-infested air, for example, made disease a constant threat, as all previous voyagers to Venus had discovered, while hurricanes and storms impeded work and were a danger to human life. The children thought it odd to retreat in the face of such obstacles—such a splendid planet simply had to be conquered. Thousands of doctors could be dispatched at once to combat the germs and diseases; as for the hurricanes and storms, engineers could build high walls and put up lightning rods. “Let nine out of ten die in the attempt,” said a lad of twelve, “This is something worth dying for. Victory at any price!” And it was evident from his fiery gaze that he would not surrender even if he were to find himself among the doomed nine-tenths.
Enno gently and calmly demolished his opponents’ flimsy arguments, but it was obvious that deep down he symphathized with them and that his passionate youthful imagination entertained equally drastic notions. His plans, of course, had been thought through more carefully, but they were every bit as selfless. He himself had not yet been to Venus, and it was evident from his enthusiasm that he was greatly fascinated by her beauty and her perils.
When the talk was over, Enno left with me and Netti. He intended to stay another day in the city and invited me to accompany him to the art museum the following morning. Netti was busy, having been called to another city to attend an important medical conference.
4. The Museum of Art
“I must say I never even imagined that you might have special museums for works of art,” I said to Enno on our way to the museum. “I thought that sculpture and picture galleries were peculiar to capitalism, with its ostentatious luxury and crass ambition to hoard treasures. I assumed that in a socialist order art would be found disseminated throughout society so as to enrich life everywhere.”
“Quite correct,” replied Enno. “Most of our works of art are intended for the public buildings in which we decide matters of common interest, study and do research, and spend our leisure time. We adorn our factories and plants much less often. Powerful machines and their precise movements are aesthetically pleasing to us in and of themselves, and there are very few works of art which would fully harmonize with them without somehow weakening or dissipating their impact. Least decorated of all are our homes, in which most of us spend very little time. As for our art museums, they are scientific research institutes, schools at which we study the development of art or, more precisely, the development of mankind through artistic activity.”
The museum was located on a little island, in the middle of a lake, connected to the shore by a narrow bridge. The building itself, a rectangular structure surrounded by a garden full of fountains and beds of blue, white, black, and green flowers, was lavishly adorned outside and flooded with light inside. It contained none of that jumbled accumulation of statues and paintings that clutters the major museums of Earth. Several hundred pictures depicted the evolution of the plastic arts from the first primitive works of the prehistorical period to the technically perfect creations of the previous century. Throughout, one could sense the presence of that living inner wholeness that people call “genius.” Obviously, these were the best works from all periods.
In order fully to understand the beauty of another world, one must be intimately acquainted with life there, and in order to convey an idea of that beauty to others one must be an organic part of that life. For that reason I cannot possibly describe what I saw, but will limit myself to hints and fragmentary references to that which impressed me most strongly.
Enno shows Leonid the Museum of Art on Mars
The basic motif of sculpture on both Earth and Mars is the marvelous human body. Most of the physical differences between us and them are not very great. If we disregard the considerable differences in the size of their eyes, and thus also to an extent the shape of their skulls, these distinctions are not greater than those between the various races on Earth. I am not well versed in anatomy and cannot give any accurate explanation of the divergencies, but I will note that my eye easily became accustomed to them and that they struck me almost immediately as original rather than ugly.
I noticed that men and women are more alike in build than is the case among most races on Earth. The women have relatively broad shoulders, while the narrow pelvis and a certain tendency to plumpness in the men make their muscles less prominent and tend to neutralize the physical differences between the sexes. This, however, is mainly true of the most recent epoch, the era of free human evolution, for in the statues dating from as late as the capitalist period the distinctions are much more obvious. It is evidently the enslavement of women in the home and the feverish struggle for survival on the part of the men which ultimately account for the physical discrepancies between them.
I was constantly conscious—now clearly, now more vaguely—that I was contemplating forms from an alien world, and this awareness somehow rendered my impressions strange and almost unreal. Even the beautiful female bodies depicted by the statues and paintings evoked in me an obscure sensation that was quite unlike the admiring aesthetic attraction I was accustomed to feeling. It resembled instead the vague premonitions that troubled me long ago as I crossed the border between childhood and adolescence.
The statues from the early periods were of a single color, as on Earth, whereas the later ones were natural. This did not surprise me. I have always thought that deviations from reality cannot be a necessary element of art; they are even anti-aesthetic when they impoverish the viewer’s reception of the work. This is the case with uniformly colored sculpture, as the concentrated idealization of life that constitutes the essence of art is lessened rather than heightened by such a lack of realism.
Like our antique sculpture, the statues and pictures of the ancient periods were infused with a majestic tranquillity, a serene harmony, an absence of tension. In the intermediate, transitional epochs, elements of a different order begin to appear: impulses, passions, an agitated drive which is sometimes mellowed in the form of erotic or religious fantasies but which sometimes bursts forth under the pressure of the enormous strain generated by an imbalance between spiritual and corporeal forces. In the socialist epoch the fundamental nature of art changed once again into harmonious movement, a tranquil and confident manifestation of strength, action free from morbid exertion, aspiration free from agitation, vigorous activity imbued with an awareness of its well-proportioned unity and invincible rationality.
If the ideal of feminine beauty expressed the infinite potential of love in the ancient art of Earth, and if the ideal beauty of the Middle Ages and Renaissance reflected the unquenchable thirst for mystical or romantic love, then the ideal of this other world in advance of our own was Love incarnate—pure, ra
diant, all-triumphant Love, serenely and proudly aware of itself. Like the most ancient Martian works of art, the most modern ones were characterized by extreme simplicity and thematic unity. Their heroes were complex human beings with a rich and harmonious variety of experiences. The works chose to portray those moments of the subject’s existence when all of life was concentrated in a single emotion or aspiration. Favorite contemporary themes included the ecstasy of creative thought, the ecstasy of love, and ecstatic delight in nature. Such themes provided a profound insight into the soul of a great people who had learned to live life in all its fullness and intensity and to accept death consciously and with dignity.
The painting and sculpture section took up half the museum, while the other half was devoted entirely to architecture. By architecture the Martians mean not only buildings and great works of engineering but also the artistic designing of furniture, tools, machines, and all other useful objects and materials. The immense significance of this art in their lives may be judged by the particular care and thoroughness with which this collection was arranged. In the form of pictures, drawings, models, and especially stereograms viewed in large steroscopes which reproduced reality in the smallest detail, the exhibition contained examples of all representative types of architecture, from the most primitive cave dwellings, with their crudely embellished utensils, to luxurious apartment buildings, decorated within by the best artists, to giant factories, with their awesomely beautiful machines, to great canals, with their granite embankments and suspension bridges. A special section was devoted to the landscaping of gardens, fields, and parks. Although I was unaccustomed to the vegetation of the planet, I was often pleased by the combinations of colors and forms that had been created by the collective genius of this large-eyed human race.
As on Earth, in the works of earlier periods elegance was often achieved at the expense of comfort, and embellishments impaired durability and interfered with the utility of objects. I detected nothing of the sort in the art of the contemporary period, either in the furniture, the implements, or the buildings and other structures. I asked Enno whether modern architecture permitted deviations from functional perfection for the sake of beauty.
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