There is no quiet and no solitude in such a house. In these homes, even silent light is noisy.
There, a fish could begin to shriek and a deaf mute to babble. Meanwhile, the man who has been granted the grace of speech — which is the breath of God — must be silent in these houses if he wishes to say something human to his neighbour.
And just as man is distinguished from an animal by the grace of speech he also has the grace of reticence, privacy and modesty. In these thin houses full of light and air there is no silence but, at best, a dumbness; no privacy but withdrawal and suppression; no modesty but, at most, shame.
When one enters such a building made of glass and stupidity and chromium metal there is one dwelling next to another just as one cage is placed next to another in the so-called aviaries of the zoological gardens.
So those people who have to live in such buildings are like animals and, at the same time, like homeless people. They spend the night in the street. And, still worse, the street spends the night with them. So it is as if each individual were spending the night with his neighbour.
The tenderness of two lovers in bed is as visible as the caressing of caged birds.
One could say that the sun, which has been let in, has brought everything into the daylight.
Those men whose job it is to build such houses say that they are practical and healthful. And, besides, people belong together. And, further, nothing human should be alien to people.
To these homebuilders, however, everything human is foreign. Solitude, silence and secrecy are just as critical to us as health, sun and fresh air. It is certainly inherent in our nature that we should live in a community with our own kind. However, we can only endure this community if we can also spend time alone. For this is human nature — we wish to be alone and also together with other people. It is written that it is not good for people to remain alone.
But man, the image of God, possesses one of the divine qualities — the ability to be both alone and with others at the same time. Yes, he has nostalgia for solitude, just as he has nostalgia for Heaven, because he was created in the image, that is to say, according to the characteristics, of God.
He cannot live in a community if he cannot satisfy his nostalgia. He disturbs the community instead of helping it.
It is only in the hour of danger — during times of war, for example — that people can stand the constant company of their own kind; and this is only because death is in the neighbourhood and death makes everyone lonely because it carries everyone off individually, even when it takes thousands in a single moment.
In the houses of which I am speaking, however, the people do not live in the face of imminent death. And they yearn for solitude.
But the designers and builders of these houses say: ‘We have to give the poor shelter, not luxury. And solitude is luxury.’
Yet it is exactly when the houses are intended for the poor that one should remember one of the worst curses of poverty — that the poor man is unable to be alone. And it is better that he should occasionally go hungry than that he should never be able to break his bread alone.
Often he would rather be alone under the wide sky at night than with others under a roof. For, although it is not good for man to live alone, it is equally bad if he is forced to be together with others.
This, however, the architects and constructors of the new houses do not know.
So people today live like birds.
They can fly, and still they live in cages.
THE BLESSINGS OF THE EARTH! PETROLEUM, POTASH, POISON
I came to one of the regions where oil wells are found. And I wrote from there to the mighty Master of a Thousand Tongues:
Mighty Master of a Thousand Tongues
I am in one of the most interesting of countries, where the famous oil wells are located. It lies at the base of a mountain range, and its activities are centred in a quite remarkable town. Oil has been found here since the mid nineteenth century. The dark wooden derricks rise from an area about fifty square kilometres in size.
They seem to me less cruel and, in a way, less dangerous to the earth’s surface when I compare them with derricks in other countries — countries that bear upon their face that curse of barrenness that is like a counterpart to the fruitfulness that lies within them. Here in this town, the sun is moderate, and there are still forests that yield only reluctantly to the towers and seem to encompass them peacefully rather than flee from them in hostility. The eye can sweep from the covered wells to the green hills.
But there is dust, white and exceptionally thick. It is as though it were not the accidental product of waste and separated matter but an independent element like water, like fire or earth, and as though it were less like the latter than the wind by which it is swirled around in a thick haze. It lies in the street like flour, powder or chalk and envelops every vehicle and pedestrian, seeming to act according to its own impulse or instinct. It has a quite special relationship with the rays of the burning sun, as though it were its duty to complete the sun’s task. And when it rains the dust transforms to an ash-grey, damp, sticky mass that coagulates in every tiny hollow into a greenish puddle.
So here is where oil is obtained. This city was just a village a couple of decades ago. Now about thirty thousand people live here. A single street — about six kilometres long — connects three towns, and it is impossible to tell where one ends and the next begins. Adjacent to the houses there stretches a wooden footpath made of short, sturdy stakes. It is not possible to build a pavement because the oil is carried to the rail station by pipes under the street. The difference between the level of the footpath and the carriageway, but also the little houses, is great, so that the pedestrian is as high as or even above the level of the rooftops and one can look down at an angle into the windows. All the little houses are made of wood. Only once in a while does a large house of brick, whitewashed and stony-faced, interrupt the sad rows of crooked, decaying and broken-down dwellings. They all sprang up overnight at a time when the stream of oil-seekers began to flow into this place. It is as though these planks had not been hastily pieced together by human hands but, rather, that the breath of human greed had accidentally piled up chance materials; not a single one of these temporary homes seems to have been meant to accommodate sleeping people but, rather, for the purpose of preserving and increasing the restlessness of insomnia. The rancid odour of oil, a stinking wonder, was what brought them here.
The incalculable illogicality, even from a geological perspective, of the laws of the underground, heightened the diggers’ excitement to the point of lust, and the constantly acute possibility of being separated by scarcely three hundred metres from a fortune worth countless millions was bound to cause an intoxication stronger than that of possession. And, although they were all exposed to the unpredictability of a lottery or a game of roulette, none of them gave in to the fatalism of waiting that would gradually prepare them for disappointment. Here, at petroleum’s source, each person indulged in the illusion that destiny could be dominated through work, and his passion in the search aggravated the dismal result into a disaster that he could bear no longer.
The small well-owners were only freed from the unbearable alternation between hope and discouragement by the powerful intervention of the large ones and of the ‘corporations’. These could purchase several properties at the same time and wait on the whims of the subterranean element with the relative calm that is one of the manly virtues of wealth. Besides these powerful interests, for whom patience cost nothing and who could quickly sow millions in order to reap an eventual harvest of billions, there came speculators on a smaller scale, whose lower credit was balanced by smaller risk, and these diminished even further the chances of the working-class adventurers. These gradually gave up their dreams. They kept to their shacks.