The Human Roundabout
By JACQUETTA HAWKES , WE all have a rueful familiarity with the fact that man has a genius for frustrating his own endeavour. He builds cities for their amenity, and makes them so huge and vile that he flies from them whenever he can; trying to escape into the countryside he brings the town with him, destroying the thing he loves. He invents the motor-car to carry him swiftly wherever he would go. but then builds so many that they move• more slowly than an ass. He hurtles himself faster and faster through the air, but sees to it that he is kept from his destination by hours spent in the unsympathetic company of customs, currency and passport-officers. The range of easy travel is vastly extended, but so, too, is the spread of uniformity, so that now a man may travel a thousand miles and encounter far less stimulating novelty, less variety of experience, than was his before within a hundred. Today —perhaps already the words sound banal to our human ears— our species, having sacrificed precious values to a gigantic increase in its numbers, is preparing some ingenious devices for their abrupt reduction.
1 am concerned at the moment, however, with one particular aspect of this perverse genius of ours which differs considerably from the rest; here it is not a matter of total frustration, of sitting in a traffic-block in a machine devised to travel at a hundred miles an hour, but rather of helpless movement in a circle. Man is seen like a child riding a horse that gallops and blows the steam of energy from its nostrils—but it is a wooden horse; they are carved plumes of steam, and the round- about brings the child back to the place where he started. It is a touching, pathetic spectacle; and also a comic one.
I was first made to think of this particular human round- about by the sight of a raw beefsteak thrust into the charcoal grill of a smart and expensive restaurant. Behind the chef's white cap and the costly city glitter of the diners there appeared an image of another glowing charcoal fire—was it at a cave- mouth or on a river-bank ?—and round it the dusky figures of hunters grilling the freshest of steaks. How surprising, I. thought, that if against desperate odds, with the help probably of thousands of marvellous machines, you have been success- ful in conducting business from the seventy-eighth floor of an astounding modern building in the fabulous modern city of New York, this is one of your rewards. To be able to spend an excessive part of your earnings on the charcoal-grilled steaks which your prehistoric, or, for that matter, American Indian, forbears took for granted, while the unsuccessful have to be content with meat which has been tinned, frozen, trans- ported vast distances by means of all the scientific devices which men labour to invent and to manufacture.
What is true of meat applies also to a great many of the nicest things to eat. How much trouble, wealth or influence is needed to get bread that has not been robbed of all flavour and goodness, honey which is the product of bees and not industrial chemists, cheese which does not taste of soap and silver paper, and a covering for one's daily ,bread that originates with a cow and not with a whale or objectionable nuts.
The train of thought started by the steak went joyfully for- ward. Furs, for instance. Men, it is true, do not hanker after them excessively, though even among males it should be noted ' that it is only those who are of noble blood or who have reached the top flights of worldly success who may sport a skin or two round their necks. But women, what painful things have not been done to win them the furs that thousands of years ago were worn by all ? Low domestic wheedling or quarrels, com= petitive toil, ruthlessness and corruption in high places, scandalous deeds by the, women themselves—all to put the pelts of wild animals on to a female back. There are scores of fabrics made with all the cunning of science, the skill and organisation of industry, but they go to the poor, the unsuccessful; it' takes a man who has stormed the highest battlements of material civilisation to dress his wife in the skins of " a small, semi- aquatic stoat-like animal " whose family name is putorius because it stinks, or in the evening to wrap her in the ermines that must have been so easily available to the hunters of the Ice Age.
Having dealt with furs, my thoughts leapt on to those notori- ously aristocratic or privileged activities—hunting, shooting and fishing. No need facetiously to drop the final g to prove that taking part in these most ancient pastimes is among the most jealously sought privileges known to man. It is true that certain of the humbler forms of shooting and fishing may be the reward not of wealth or breeding but of hardly-won leisure—but what is better proof of the high value attached to these sports than the fact that men eagerly devote to them their precious afternoons off, or the few free years allowed them after their retirement from life's struggle ? These humble forms of fishing and shoot- ing do exist, but the expensive and exclusive are more prevalent. How much will a man pay, and how much suffer, in an attempt to pull trout and salmon from a stream, or tunny from the deep; what fortunes, won perhaps in the manufacture of television sets or potted meat, will not be expended to enable a man to expose himself and his friends on a damp windy moor for the sake of this ancient business of shooting ? As for hunting, surely nothing carries a higher social prestige. Once; at a house in the country, when a misguided young man _trying to make conversation asked me did I manage to hunt from London," I almost swooned with satisfaction. How well this pre-eminence agrees with our roundabout, for this is the oldest human occupation of them all. Angling with hook and line has been going on for hardly more than 8,000 years, shooting for perhaps another 10,000, but hunting—quarter pf a million years, half a million . . . ? It begins to be embarrassing.
At this point I found myself considering another example of our circular progress which it is difficult to discuss without being suspected of cheapness, vulgarity and bad taste. I refer, I must admit it, to the He Man. There is, I believe, inescapable evidence to prove that members of my sex, and among them some of the most highly civilised, feel a strong attraction towards bull-fighters, cowboys, gamekeepers, men brought up by apes, hairy men and others who have more than is usual in common with our early ancestors. They seem quite sharply to prefer them to business-men, civil servants, professors of literature, clerks, nylon-spinners and all those who may be said to have advanced furthest along our evolutionary way; to be most remote from the savage.
I have just had another thought. May it not be that the latest enthusiasm of the wealthy, the fashion for swimming on the sea-bed with frog-like flappers, marks an unconscious desire to return to the conditions enjoyed by our amphibious or fishy precursors ? It appears to me to be quite possible. If so, our circle grows ever wider. It is, as I have said, a pathetic and amusing spectacle, this return of man to what he is supposed to have left behind. He has toiled through 5,000 years of civilisation to higher and higher technical achievement, to deeper and deeper comfort and safety. Now we have discovered that the things he most desires, for which he will pay the highest price, are precisely those which were enjoyed by the hunters and pastoralists of the uncivilised past, not only on special occasions, but as a matter of course throughout their lives. My arguments are largely fallacious, but after all they may be straws pointing towards some truths. It does seem that nature makes a great many things better than we do; that is one truth. Another is that we human beings have not yet outgrown our past; because of the bodies and feelings we have inherited, • we need contact with nature and we need excitement. If we ever evolve far towards Olaf Stapledon's Great Brains, then we may really be uprooted and never spare a thought for hunting, shooting and fishing, beefsteak—or even. mink. By then per- haps we shall be satisfied with baked beans, paper games, plastic suits and men with long, slim fingers. If so, then I'm glad to realise that I shall have been dead for several thousand years.
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