September/October 1984 RAIN Page 3 Illustration from the prologue of the Kelmscott Chaucer, printed by William Morris' Kelmscott Press in 1896 We Have No Art—We Do Everything As Well As We Can by Tanya Kucak The Balinese say, “We have no art—we do everything as well as we can." In other times and other places, the ideal of art in everyday life was a cultural assumption. We can learn from the past. Studying examples from literature and history can give us insight into what it means to be a member of a society in which, art and life were not separate, in which design and balance in life and work were customary. Novels give insight by creating whole worlds. There are several utopian novels that portray agrarian, preindustrial societies where art is integrated with daily life and play is important, where people are not specialists but know about a lot of things. “You touch life in fewer ways" if you do only one thing, according to a character in Austin Tappan Wright's Islandia (1944,1975, 944 pp., $9.95 from: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 383 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10017). Islandia is an isolationist country that does not trade with other nations, and has no industry itself, so the things that people use in their work are made by hand and made well. People travel on horseback, in sailboats, and on skis. Islandians who must live in the city don't consider it their home, but have a place to go, at the country house of a friend or relative, when they need to get away from the city. Leisure time is regarded as productive time; these people would approve of Henry David Thoreau's "wide margins" in his life. At one point in the novel, an American visitor to Islandia tries to convince an Islandian that the country would be better off with railroads and mines. The Islandian explains, "If we go on here as we have been, and are let alone, life hundreds of years from now will be as it is now; and life now with growing things all about us and changing weather and lovely places kept beautiful and new people growing up, is too rich for us already, too rich for us to endure sometimes. We haven't half exhausted it, and we cannot—we cannot so long as young people are born and grow up and learn new things and have new ideas. All that is to us the vital thing ... and the change foreigners propose—railroads
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