Page 16 - Art First: Simon Morley: Lost Horizon

who voyage to an unknown island in search of an improbable mountain—
the link between Heaven and Earth. ‘Its summit must be inaccessible’, writes the
narrator, who is a member of the party, ‘but its base accessible to human beings

as nature made them. It must be unique and it must exist geo graphically. e door
to the invisible must be visible’. By posing such a con undrum—by imagining
what both is and is not, and by committing himself to the pursuit of the impossi-
ble—Daumal catches a meaning behind all these quests.

For the vision of Utopia is a vital imaginative corrective to the obvious failings
of ‘reality’ as it is given to us though upbringing and education. It speaks of the
universal human wish that things be different from the way they are. It emblem -

atises the desire, as Jean-Luc Nancy writes in e Inoperative Community, for
a com munity beyond social divisions and beyond subordination to techno pol -
iti cal dominion, and thereby beyond such wasting away of liberty, speech, or
of simple happiness . . . . a place from which to surmount the unraveling that

occurs with the death of each one of us, that death that, when no longer anything
more than the death of the individual, carries an unbearable burden and collapses
into insignificance’. But in order to envisage this new horizon it is necessary
to travel outside the doxa—the conventional—and this means daring to believe

in the impossible.

Orwell wrote: ‘whoever tries to imagine perfection simply reveals his own empti -
ness’. And yet, if we don’t try to ‘imagine perfection’, where will we find ourselves?

Won’t we be condemned to stunted acceptance of the status quo? Orwell didn’t