VI

THE ARCHITECT PLANS THE WORLD

BUT THAT CARNIVAL of the Gods and those bishops on broomsticks and that heart to heart talk about the difficulties of world-mending with one of its most celebrated failures, are just two among my endless adventures in Dreamland, and I do not know from night to night what new refreshment awaits me.

There is a lot of architecture beyond there. Sometimes I dream of a purely architectural world. But that architecture goes far beyond the mere putting-up of buildings and groups of buildings here and there. The architects of Dreamland lay out a whole new world. Their gigantic schemes tower to the stratosphere, plumb the depths of the earth, groom mountains, divert ocean currents and dry up seas. My identity merges inextricably with every dreamland architect. “We” do this; “we” do that. We share a common excitement at every fresh idea.

The agronomes—there are no farmers in Dreamland—come along and tell us, “We can produce all the food and the best of food and the most delightful of food, not to mention all the drinks that make glad the heart of man, most easily and expeditiously for your happy thousands of millions, in those few hundred thousand square miles we have marked out upon this globe for you, and the rest of the planet you can have to live in and make homes of and gardens of and playgrounds and—slightly controlled—wildernesses, and everything you architects can dream of and devise.”

The geographers and metallurgists and mineralogists and engineers unfold their possibilities to us. “This is what you will be wise to do,” they will say, “and this you can do if you will, and it is for you architects to see that none of our mines and pits become eyesores and offences against the ever acuter sensibilities of mankind,” and forthwith we shall sit down with them and draw and redraw our plans. The artists will come demanding surfaces to decorate; the musicians will demand great sound-proof auditoria, so that those who want to hear can hear and no one be bothered by unsolicited noise. All roads lead to architecture and building and rebuilding. These things We, the Creative King in Man, will carry out and carry on.

In these dreams I apprehend gigantic facades, vast stretches of magnificently schemed landscape, moving roads that will take you wherever you want to go instead of your taking them. “All this We do and more also,” I rejoice. And though endless lovely new things are achieved, nothing a human heart has loved will ever be lost. I find myself a child again, the town-bred child I was, rejoicing in the sounds and sights of a country lane, delighting in by-ways where the honeysuckle twines about the ragged robin and one picks and nibbles the bread and cheese buds. Or one creeps through a hedge, conquering its resistance, into a tactfully unguarded garden where there are white raspberry canes and half-ripe gooseberries, black cherries and greengages. And then back to the grownup magnificence once more…

Old fruits there are in Dreamland, but we feast on many marvelous new ones also. There is a vast Luther Burbank organization at work upon them. And in these latter days, as the war effort strains our lives towards greater and greater austerity, there has been a notable increase of feasting and banqueting in my Dreams. We sit long at table, for there is time for everything where time ceases. I will not tantalize you with my last menu…

I cannot set any of these things down in sketches and forecasts and detailed descriptions, for how can I foretell what a hundred million brains, all better than mine, will conceive and plan and replan and continually enhance—they dissolve and vanish as I wake, but in my dream, I dream they are delightful beyond all experience, and, with that, Dreamland is satisfied.