"Ian Watson - Early in the Evening" - читать интересную книгу автора (Watson Ian)

the other hand, might be germane.

A few days earlier Hopkins had attempted to explain how and why this
might be.

"Evolution," he had declared, "is undergoing a strange recapitulation. Do I
mean evolution as such? Forgive me, that is silly talk! It is our history
which is undergoing recapitulation day by day. Our recent social history in
all its circumstances." Hopkins had been a leading light of the local
Historical Society, and indeed come evening-time he still was.

"Throughout history," he confided, "the concept of God evolved. It is in
this sense I suggest that God might well now be viewed, ahem, as
devolving into Gaea -- as a more primitive power of seasons and crops
reasserts Herself. Should we not find this suggestive? As for the
miraculous nature of what besets us, alas, sophisticated theology outgrew
the magical -- "



"Mummy, why do I need to spend the mornings weeding the same old
weeds? Why can't we sleep in and get up late? Why can't we wait till we
can drive to the supermarket -- ?"



In the morning it was always early. Roughly eight hundred years early. In
the morning the Lucas's home was a thatched hovel of mud-and-wattle. So
were most of the other devolved houses each behind fence or hedge,
though the stockaded Manor with its ox-stalls and barns and buttery was
of sturdy stone.

Fields of long narrow strips extended to the great woodland where pigs
foraged. Sheep and cattle grazed the common meadow. Geese honked
around the fish ponds.

Mornings could be an optimistic time for many souls. People were full of
expectation for later in the day, though first there was hard labour. Ewes to
milk. Butter to churn. Fallows to plough, manure to scatter. Wood to cut.


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Early, in the Evening - a story by Ian Watson

Garden plots of leeks and onions and garlic and mint and parsley to weed
and tend.

Might the Lucas family not simply laze around and wait until evening
when their house was of bricks and mortar with a car parked in the
driveway? Likewise the Smiths and Baxters, the Bakers and the Randalls?