"Judith Merril - The Future of Happiness" - читать интересную книгу автора (Merril Judith)

THE FUTURE OF HAPPINESS
First publication: January 1979.

TOMORROW WILL BE better? Better than what? Which way?
Depends on what you're looking for. Health? "Freedom"? (What's that?) Material comfort?
Convenience? "Beauty"? (What's that?) Knowledge? "Relationships"? (Eh?) Just plain happiness?
Whether you use crystal balls, clairvoyants, or computer simulations to predict the future, there are
only two clear answers.
First, tomorrow will be different. Our society, like our biosphere, is unstable. It can only stabilize
through change.
Second, the future will bring dizzying heights of happiness - and dismal depths of despair. And
everything in-between. Even as now. Even as ever. Delight and discontent are relative and related. One is
a measure of the other, and the stimuli that produce them vary for every society, and for each individual.
(Did you really experience more sheer joy with your first orgasm than with your first true-love
teenage kiss? Or: after the orgasm, can the kiss still bring the same burst of heaven?)
Happiness comes in every color of the rainbow. Like the rainbow, it can be experienced, perceived,
pursued - but never possessed, prepared for, or reliably predicted. Like the rainbow, it is an event
dependent on the percipient's position in a particular environment. Like the rainbow, it is more likely to
manifest itself after a storm.
For the last 100 years or so, it has been fashionable to predict the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth.
Utopian socialists, technocrats, people's revolutionaries, transcendental meditators have come up with
formulas for glowing happiness for all—all the time. The briefly more credible of these happy prophecies
were based on the reasonable assumption that when everyone had enough of the necessities, and at least
some of the luxuries, joy would reign.
Not so. The happiness of affluence is always over the next hill because our definitions change.
"Necessity" means new soles for shoes one decade, color televisions the next.
And how about the year after tomorrow? Where to find happiness in 50 years, or 100? In the
unexpected moment, as always.
The year is 2029. A half century ago, everybody talked about energy and population and pollution,
but nobody did anything constructive. Every year the shortages of food, fuel, water, shelter, space grew
worse. When the bottom finally dropped out of the world economy in the 1990s, the industrialized world,
with its complex production and delivery systems, completely collapsed. There were riots and
bloodbaths in New York and Tokyo, Amsterdam and Moscow, Berlin and Buenos Aires.
The great cities died. But handfuls of refugees survived in scattered settlements, and on the rebuilt
foundations of abandoned family farms.
Martha draws her ragged blanket around her, shivering, as she opens the peepholes of the
dugout, one by one. All quiet. No sign of feral dog packs, no scent of feral human marauders. No
sign of Will and the boys either. If the wild dogs have moved on, game must be even scarcer than
before.
She cannot endure another day inside. The sun is bright and brilliant through the peepholes; it
will be warm and beautiful outside. At the back of the dugout, the baby wakes, wailing. The cry is
too thin. So is Martha's milk. She picks up the baby and, defiantly, recklessly, steps out into the
sunlit clearing, undefended.
She sits on a cushion of skins on the ground nursing her child in spring sunshine. And then she
sees. Six feet from where she sits, the plot of land she turned over so painfully with the broken
spade last week is covered with green.
Green!
For eight years (the births of seven children, the deaths of four), she has dug and planted
some of the stock of hoarded seeds, and watched as the poisoned land refused to bring forth.
And now - green - tiny seedlings sprouting promise across 15 square feet of sun-warmed soil!