Seven Days in New Crete (Penguin Modern Classics) Read Free Page B

judges capacity?’
    ‘Very well, who does judge it?’
    He translated this, and Sally answered: ‘Parents and playmates and neighbours. The child remains in his mother’s estate until there’s general agreement that he belongs somewhere else. A misfit is almost always recognized before his education begins in earnest. Then representatives of the estate to which he properly belongs come to claim him.’
    ‘Don’t the parents ever protest?’
    ‘Why should they? It’s painful to lose a child, but it’s worse to have one who doesn’t belong in the house. The parents are the first to reject him. usually they get another of the right kind in exchange – an orphan, or a misfit from some other estate. I myself was hatched in the wrong nest, as we say; my parents were recorders. On the whole the magicians breed true; but then we have small families and about one in every three of us was born in another estate.’
    ‘There are five estates, you said? We English had five once: nobles, clerics, yeomen, tradesmen and serfs. What are yours?’
    ‘We reckon them on the hand, beginning with the thumb. Look,
thumb
, the captains, who roughly correspond with your nobles;
forefinger
, the recorders;
third finger
, the commons – do you follow?’
    ‘I understand why the thumb is the captain: it comes first and it’s the strongest, and it combines easily with any of the other fingers. And the forefinger is the recorder because it directs the pen. But the third finger?’
    ‘That’s the middle one and the tallest; you see, the commons are the middle estate and the most numerous. Here it’s called the fool’s finger. The fourth finger stands for the servants, because of all the fingers it’s the least capable of independent movement.’
    ‘Palmists make it the Apollo finger.’
    ‘I know, and Apollo, you remember, was once a servant. The poet Cleopatra says in her tercet,
Three Costly Errors
: “The first, when Apollo forgot that he was a servant and played the master.” Servants, as you’ll agree, make the worst masters. Well, that leaves the little finger, which stands for the magicians, and that’s because –’
    ‘Because in fairy stories it’s always connected with magic?’
    ‘If you like to put it that way. And because ours is the smallest of the five estates. They’re all interdependent, like the five divisions of a plane-tree leaf. Each kingdom has its five estates, each kingdom is a leaf on the New Cretan plane-tree: that’s about the first thing one learns at school.’
    ‘Very neat; but I should like to hear how a child reveals his natural estate to his playmates. It sounds rather mysterious to me.’
    ‘It’s not at all mysterious. Take a ball-game, for example. Did boys play baseball in the Late Christian epoch? I forget. Or won’t that happen until Pantisocratism comes in?’
    ‘They play it quite a lot. Men too.’
    ‘Well then, in a ball-game, if a boy’s timorous, unenterprising and quiet, and if he prefers taking orders to making decisions, and doesn’t care on which side he plays, and prefers fielding to hitting or pitching, then he’s obviously a servant. If he’s more interested in discussing the fine points of the game, or keeping the score than in playing it, then he’s a recorder. If he’s more interested in organizing it than playing it, then he’s a captain. If he prefers hitting and pitching to fielding and shows strong partisan feeling, then he’s one of the commons. But if he plays without really taking part in the game, so that other players are made uncomfortable by his presence, even if he plays it well, then he’s a magician.’
    ‘What exactly do you mean by magician?’
    ‘Magicians think in an active way; everyone else thinks passively.’
    ‘I see. So mathematicians, philosophers and scientists are magicians?’
    ‘No, people of that sort, if we had them (but we don’t) would be recorders. One doesn’t need an active mind to record.’
    ‘But surely,