The Oasis by Mary McCarthy

of Hitler, Stalin, Franco, Mussolini, were not, so to speak, dealt out to them as the cards they were forced to play with, or else get out of the game. They shuffled their own deck, and even the realists, who saw the doom of the venture in some practical joker they called “human nature,” expected this joker to assert itself in the behavior of the colonists themselves and not somewhere outside them, in the inscrutable order of things.
    The recovery, if only in token, of a world small and self-contained, had, that first night, an exhilarating effect, and the presence of very obvious difficulties of apractical sort only enlivened the membership to meet and answer the challenge. The committee in charge of housing had been prepared for a great many complaints; it received nothing but praise. To many of the members, the discovery that they could do without their comforts came as a delightful surprise, as though the material objects which had been subtracted from their bodies were added, by way of compensation, to their moral girth. For a majority, material life in the real world had been easy, relatively speaking, and mental life hard; the reversal of this relation gave birth to a sense of resourcefulness long missing from their spirits. The limits of their mental capacities they knew all too well. They had yet to find the limits of their physical powers, but the disclosure that he could trim a wick, say, was an almost overwhelming experience for a man who had felt sick with fear whenever the electric company wrote him that the power would be turned off if the bill were not paid by the fifteenth. Independent action became, for the first time that night, something more than a phrase; the most impetuous spirits went racing ahead in their talk to a moment when the colony would produce not only its own eggs, milk, butter, cheese, hams, vegetables, and bacon, but furniture, shoes, and clothing. The idea that for certain things—oil, paper, medicines—they would always be beholden to society nearly brought tears to their eyes, as it collided sharply with their fancy, though they had faced it calmly enough back there in the city, where any improvement in their condition seemed almosttoo much to ask for. A complete break with the present was already being envisioned in some quarters before the first egg had been laid, and one purist, going for milk, was arguing with another the propriety of their action, since according to the by-laws a herd should have been delivered on the day of their arrival—a firm line must be taken or they would soon be buying store-bread at the filling-station down below.
    Joe Lockman was the only one in the group to be genuinely disturbed by the regression, as he thought of it, to an age of inconvenience. He was an old hand at roughing it—which was not the trouble. Just to show the stuff he was made of, he had spent the whole afternoon with his scythe, subduing the Utopian hillside, working at top speed and with no variation of pace, leaving havoc behind him and alarm in the minds of his colleagues, who did not understand the motive for such a wholesale act of destruction. The signs of industry in his fellows—a man mowing the lawn and another putting up a hammock; a husband driving in clothes-poles and a wife hanging curtains in her window—he had watched with favor, interrupting his work to come down and give a word of advice (“Just let me have that lawn-mower a minute, young man, and I’ll show you how to do it”). Something, nevertheless, in the prevailing attitude did not smell right to him. It struck him that the colonists were virtually playing house. It made him quite uneasy to see those old lyre-backed wicker chairs dragged out so joyfully onto the lawn; he remembered them perfectly fromhis youth and regretted not having brought his foam-rubber glider from Belmont, brand-new last autumn and a thousand times more comfortable. All those oohs and aahs over the woodstoves and the waffle-irons