Perfection City

“ Olive looked with a shy glance towards her husband, who took her hand in his for a moment, while Uncle David, who sat at the end of the room near Madame, said in a loud voice:
“Quite right, quite right, couldn’t ha’ had a better reason.”
“Therefore it becomes our duty to impress upon our new sister the principles which have been active in forming this Community,” said Brother Wright, without paying any heed to Uncle David’s interruption. “Perfection City has been founded to teach the world how to live. The old civilization has been tried and found wanting. It is time for a new one. ”

“ One of the great advantages 25of Perfection City is that we all have time for the cultivation of our higher natures.”
“Just now,” said Olive, “my husband seems to have no thought in his mind but the cultivation of that field over there. He is at work early and late. No person could possibly work harder for himself or his individual advantage than he does for the Community.”
“There’s just a case in point,” remarked Mary Winkle complacently. “I always thought your husband very narrow in his views. He slaves away at this corn planting as if that were the chief end and object of his existence. ”

“ Ruby was old in body, but the youngest of them all in mind, except Uncle David, who was her senior by four years. Mrs. Ruby believed in Perfection City, though she reserved the right of private judgment on certain of the tenets of its founders, and in particular, she had lately felt misgivings as to the worldly wisdom of their principle of non-resistance. She knew, however, that the Pioneers were going to show the world the new and better way—the way 110which led into no competition for supremacy, but into peaceful paths of universal progress. ”

“ There ain’t nobody else so big and awkward looking ’bout here on this prairie as me. Why, there was a man over to Perfection City yesterday, he come from beyond Cotton Wood Creek, and he said he calculated I’d be powerful useful on washing days, ’cause if they tied the clothes-line to me I’d do instead of a pole, an’ timber is mighty scarce anyhow.”
Uncle David gave a long loud laugh that set Diana into an ecstasy of delight, and was of itself so joyous that, after a moment, Olive also joined in with a merry titter. ”

“ Such abstract counsels of perfection as the descriptions of the ideal city, from Augustine through More or Campanella and Bacon to Morris, have been consolatory to many, to others inspiring. Still, a Utopia is one thing, a plan for our city improvement is another. ”

“ “Beautiful city! so venerable, so lovely, so unravaged by the fierce intellectual life of our century, so serene! ... Her ineffable charm keeps ever calling us to the true goal of all of us, to the ideal, to perfection.” ”

“ One can easily imagine the older cities looking scornfully or pityingly down upon it, themselves secure in the grim or the delicate beauty of their age. Only once in many generations does a city rise which achieves a character, an individuality, without waiting for the lingering years to bestow it. It happens so seldom as to come almost into the realm of the miraculous. Yet to him who for the first time sees New York at night, or as the declining sun sets ten thousand roofs for the moment aflame—a miracle seems not more wonderful than this. ”

“ The spires shoot up into the sky—the domes tranquilly rest there—all the roofs glitter as with diamonds, all the white walls are lustrous, save where, here and there, some loftier range of buildings hangs its steadfast shadow o'er square or street, magnifying the city, by means of separate multitudes of structures, each town-like in itself, and the whole gathered together by the outward eye, and the inward imagination, worthy indeed of the name of Metropolis. ”

“ It’s rather fine, do you know, the enthusiasm of these homeless, meatless, pretty-well-cleaned-out inhabitants, for the great new city that is to be. We all feel like pioneers—and look like them!—but with this difference: we know that we are in at the making of a great new city, and the old boys never knew what was coming to them, or how soon they’d move on. ”

“ These were the moving streets, the beautiful residential apartments, following the modern neo-functional patterns and participational design which had completely altered the pattern of city living. The Old City still remained, of course—the slums, the tenements, the skid-rows of the metropolis—but this was the teeming heart of the city, a new home for men to live in. ”

“ All sleeps with that peculiar air of serene majesty known to this city only;—this city that has grown, not out of the necessities of commerce nor the luxuries of wealth, but first out of heroism, then out of faith. ”

“ In this day of great wealth and wonderful inventions we realize more and more the value of the city to mankind, and the quality of the city as a means of culture. Cities are not merely marts of commerce; they stand for civility; they are civilization itself. No untried naked Adam in Eden might ever pass for a civilized man. The city street is the school of philosophy, of art, of letters; city society is the home of refinement. When the rustic visits the city he puts on his best clothes and his best manners. ”

“ They are tearing down the ugly buildings and building upon their sites the beautiful, weaving in the almost gentle creations of the modern architects, a new city which after a little time will cease to be modeled upon Europe but which will serve, in itself, as a model capital for the entire world to follow. ”

“ Joy's City hath her streets of gem-wrought flow'rs;
She hath her palaces high reared and bold,
And tender shades of perfumed lily bowers;
But ever day by day, and ever night by night,
An Angel measures still our City of Delight.
He hath a rule of gold, and never stays,
But ceaseless round the burnish'd ramparts glides;
He measures minutes of her joyous days,
Her walls, her trees, the music of her tides;
The roundness of her buds—Joy's own fair city lies,
Known to its heart-core by his stern and thoughtful eyes. ”

“ To this ideal unity of healthy town, with its practical and scientific schools of all kinds, with its meditative cloister of ethical and social idealism, of unified science and philosophy, of imagination and drama, all culminating in the polity, culture, and art which make a city proper, we have here the corresponding defects in detail. ”

“ That great City is, like some of the capitals of Europe, built on a broad river, with the mass of the metropolis on the one bank, but a wide-spreading suburb on the other. As the Trastevere is to Rome, as Southwark to London, so is earth to heaven, the bit of the city on the other side the bridge. ”

“ Listlessly Lazarus set foot on the streets of the Eternal City, as though all its riches, all the majesty of its gigantic edifices, all the lustre and beauty and music of refined life, were simply the echo of the wind in the desert, or the misty images of hot running sand. Chariots whirled by; the crowd of strong, beautiful, haughty men passed on, builders of the Eternal City and proud partakers of its life; songs rang out; fountains laughed; pearly laughter of women filled the air, while the drunkard philosophised and the sober ones smilingly listened ”

“ Countless, indeed, are the forms of cities; even limiting our field of observation to those that have grown up in the last century they are numerous enough. Their differences and analogies would doubtless repay analysis, always supposing that we are clear how far the modern town, as contrasted with the mediaeval or Graeco-Roman city, can usefully be treated as "an integrate." ”

“ Often I have gone forth from listening to one of these earnest discussions to look about me on that wind-swept, sandblown, flimsy, dirty, sprawling camp they called a city, with its half dozen “magnificent” brick buildings that any New England village could duplicate, and have laughed wildly until the tears came, over the absurdity of it. I was young. I did not know that a city is not bricks but men, is not fact but the vitality of a living ideal. ”

“ I sat at the window of Tavistock Villa, watching the men returning from the city to their quiet, suburban homes. I wondered if they were glad to free themselves from the much maligned atmosphere of London for this invigorating air, or if they would have preferred the metropolis, with all its unhealthy faults, to the sedate and monotonous wholesomeness of Kew.
I would sooner live ten years in the city than fifty years in the country. I hate the balmy atmosphere of rurality; I loathe the suburban surroundings. Give me the city with its life, its motion, its meaning, its excitement. ”

“ One needs only to shut one’s eyes and listen, to imagine that the town is already a real city. Mr. Elkins seems to be the center of this new civic self-esteem. The air is full of it, and I admit that I am affected by it. ”

“ The latter class, indeed, when once they have learned to love the town of their adoption, frequently become its warmest enthusiasts, even though they may have held at one time that city contentedness could not be had without the symmetry, softness, and repose of older civilizations,92 or even that true happiness was impossible when walled in by stone and steel from the sight and smell of green fields and running brooks. ”

“ For, as I intimated, these young cities of the west, only a half-century old as cities—children by the side of Paris, London, Rome—are beginning seriously to take thought of the morrow, not simply of multiplying their numbers nor of sending their multitudes back to the country but of giving them prospect and promise of a better, more comfortable, more wholesome life, capable of a higher individual and collective development within the city. ”

“ Those condemned to wear it all their life long, live in an underground city, which is accounted a wonder of the world in all the five continents. It is an architectural wonder—that is true. It is light and shining bright and a model of tidiness. It lacks nothing but the sun—and the rain—and the moon by night—nothing but the sky. That is why the children which are born there have their gnome-like faces.... Do you want to go down into this city under the earth in order the more to enjoy your dwelling which lies so high above the great Metropolis, in the light of the sky? ”

“ And you, father, you press your fingers upon the little blue metal plate near your right hand, and your great glorious, dreadful city of Metropolis roars out, proclaiming that she is hungry for fresh human marrow and human brain and then the living food rolls on, like a stream, into the machine-rooms, which are like temples, and that, just used, is thrown up.... ”

“ The vast silver-grey city seemed to him cold, monotonously impressive and oppressive; he was not in sympathy with it, being totally unaccustomed to the splendour of a municipal ensemble with all its beauty of reticence and good taste. The vast vistas, the subdued loveliness of detail, the stately tranquillity of this capital, he did not understand after the sham, the ignorance, the noisy vulgarity of his native municipality. ”

“ Only a few miles apart, they are like the villas on the outskirts of a central imaginary city, from which the wealthy and poor likewise fled to a more retired country life, to enjoy both seclusion and society, both the pleasures of country life and the advantages of an active city, where every luxury and necessity can be found at the door of every home. ”

“ The result inevitably has something of the deadly dullness of a new rectangular town, as compared with the beauty and richness of an ancient city which has lived and grown with the separate lives and individualities of many generations. What has grown is always more living than what has been decreed ”

“ After breakfast, righted my things, and wrote journal. Took a walk with my father through some of the principal streets. The town is perfect silence and solitude, compared with New York; there is a greater air of age about it too, which pleases me. The red houses are not so fiercely red, nor the white facings so glaringly white; in short, it has not so new and flaunting a look, which is a great recommendation to me. The city is regularly built, the streets intersecting each other at right angles. ”

“ She is no longer an example to the provinces; they do not imitate her fashions, and are ready to scoff at her pretensions. The old London of the gloomy theatres, the narrow, dirty streets, the London of Simpson’s and Evans’, and the decent supper rooms, was a thousand times more romantic a city in my eyes than this County Council Babylon, with its raucous prophets and its perpetual cant of moralities. Let the blame be on my head which dares to think such treason. I am lonely in wide streets, and the gospel of modernity depresses me. ”

“ Out of unconscious slumber into the brilliant morning and the thick activity we come. But, by-and-by, the heaving mass breaks into units, and one by one dissolves into the shadow of the night. Two cities grow up side by side—the city in which men appear, the city into which they vanish; the city whose houses and goods they possess for a little while [33] and then leave behind them, and the city whose white monuments just show us the pinnacles of their estates in the eternal world. ”

“ The reason is that for generations the eyes of those people have been unconsciously educated by the harmonious lines of well-proportioned buildings, finely finished detail of stately colonnade, and shady perspective of quay and boulevard. After years of this subtle training the eye instinctively revolts from the vulgar and the crude. There is little in the poorer quarters of our city to rejoice or refine the senses; squalor and all-pervading ugliness are not least among the curses that poverty entails. ”