"Ian Watson - Early, In The Evening" - читать интересную книгу автора (Watson Ian)

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. 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?
Naturally Richard and Elisabeth had discussed this when the kids were
finally watching television.
Children did not experience to the same degree as adults the necessity to
perform -- to involve oneself fully and methodically in the sequence of
each day. Partly the grown-ups were succumbing to group pressure. Yet
there was also a personal, almost ontological aspect, powerfully
superstitious.
"If we don't all follow the sequence," Richard had said, "then the
sequence mightn't carry us along with it."
"We might miss out on the results," agreed Elisabeth.
Of course everyone lived for the results. The freezer food, the microwave
oven, the phone, the soft bed -- which, come the morning, would once again
be a sack stuffed with straw.
In the afternoons industrialisation occurred. In its own way industry was
dirty and fatiguing. Yet it augured a progressively neater and easier
world. Where the strip-fields and woodland had once been, would stand
estates of houses and zones of light industry. Newspapers would appear
around four o'clock. By six o'clock there was radio; by six-thirty,