Monday, March third.
Inauguration day passed here without event. In this ideal community of Fox Island we’re so little concerned with law-the only law that bears on us at all we delight in breaking—that one wonders how far no government can be carried. One goes back to first principles in such speculation, endows man again with inalienable rights or at least inalienable desires, and then has simply to wonder how much of the love of order there is in the natural man. The fact that a large proportion of mankind can live and die without any definite knowledge of the laws of the community and without ever running counter to the forces of law is sign enough that most of the law code is but a writing down of what the average man naturally wants to do or keep from doing. There’s a sharp difference between such “common” law and the exceptional law that strikes at the personal liberty of a man, laws concerning morals, temperance, or that conscript unwilling men for war. In all law there is tyranny, in these laws tyranny shows its hand. The man who wants true freedom must escape from the whole thing. If only such souls could gravitate to a common center and build the new community with inherent law and order as its sole guide!—well, we have returned to the problem. A state that was truly interested in progress would dedicate a portion of its territory to such an experiment. But no state is interested in anything but the gain of one class, which means the oppression of the rest. How farcical sound these days “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” “No government without the consent of the governed,” and other old-fashioned principles. But they have still to be reckoned with till the last Bolshevik has been converted into a prosperous tradesman and the last idealist is dead. And now for Fox Island.
The weather is dull and gray—only last evening an hour before sundown the clouds suddenly vanished out of the heavens and the sun shone as warm and beautiful as on the fairest summer day. Then I sat out-of-doors and painted while the snow and ice melted and dripped all about. The mornings are cold, doubly cold it seems when in the half-light of dawn and perhaps a driving snow squall we run naked down the long stretch of beach and plunge into the bay. I work ceaselessly. Time flies like mad and the day of our departure is close.
THE VISION