Part Ⅰ
With a clamor of bells that set the swallows soaring, the Festival of Summer came to the city of Omelas.
In the streets between houses, between old moss-grown gardens and under avenues of trees, past great parks and public buildings, processions moved.
In other streets the music beat faster, a shimmering of gong and tambourine.
Children dodged in and out, their high calls rising like the swallows’ flights over the music and the singing. All the processions wound towards the north side of the city, where on the great water-meadow boys and girls with mud-stained feet and ankles and long arms exercised their restive horses before the race. The horses’ manes were braided with streamers of silver, gold, and green.
The air of morning was so clear that the snow still crowning the Eighteen Peaks burned with white-gold fire across the miles of sunlit air, under the dark blue of the sky. There was just enough wind to make the banners that marked the racecourse flutter. In the silence of the broad green meadows one could hear the music winding through the city streets, farther and nearer and ever approaching.
Joyous!
How can one explain joy?
They were not simple folk, you see, though they were happy. Given a description such as this, one tends to look next for the king, mounted on a stallion and surrounded by knights, or perhaps in a golden litter borne by great-muscled slaves. But there was no king. They did not use swords or keep slaves. As they did without monarchy and slavery, they also got on without a stock exchange, advertisements, secret police, or bombs.
Yet, I repeat that these were not simple folk, not dulcet shepherds, noble savages, bland utopians. They were not less complex than us. The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight; to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else.
How can I tell you about the people of Omelas? They were mature, intelligent, passionate adults whose lives were not wretched. I wish I could describe them better. I wish I could convince you. Omelas sounds in my words like a city in a fairy tale, long ago and far away, once upon a time. Perhaps it would be best if you imagined it, for certainly I cannot suit you all. For instance, how about technology? I think that there would be no cars or helicopters in and above the streets; this follows from the fact that the people of Omelas are happy people. Happiness is based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive. In the middle category, however—that of the unnecessary but undestructive, that of comfort, luxury, etc.—they could perfectly well have central heating, subway trains, washing machines, and all kinds of marvelous devices not yet invented here. Or they could have none of that; it doesn’t matter.
Most of the procession has reached the meadows by now. A marvelous smell of cooking goes forth from the tents of the provisioners. The faces of small children are amiably sticky; in the beard of a man, a couple of crumbs of rich pastry are entangled. The youths and girls have mounted their horses and are beginning to group around the starting line of the course.
A child of nine or ten sits at the edge of the crowd, alone, playing a wooden flute. His dark eyes are wholly rapt in the magic of the tune. He finishes and slowly lowers his hands holding the wooden flute. As if that little silence were the signal, all at once a trumpet sounds from the pavilion near the starting line. The horses rear on their slender legs, and some of them neigh in answer. The young riders stroke the horses’ necks and soothe them. They begin to form in ranks along the starting line. The Festival of Summer has begun.