a lot to help me forget about my heartbreak, though. I was beginning
to heal, or so it seemed. What I chose to ignore was the fact that I
didn’t love this girl and never would. It didn’t seem significant at the
time. I still threw out the idea that we should go away to Thailand
together, but she insisted that she was in Israel for reasons other than
vacation. She felt that, as she said, “everyone needs to go back to their
roots in order to understand their fruits.” Having suffered through a
very strict Catholic upbringing, she wanted to study the origins of her
family’s religion in order to make sense out of all the fears she had
been taught as a child: fears that didn’t wash with her adult mind, but
nagged her nonetheless. She needed to find out which fears were
actually hers, and which were put there by someone else.
I got myself transferred from the hatchery to food service. Since I
only worked about four hours a day, I was eager to take advantage of
the resources available to me. I started using the gym, the sauna, and
the library. A few hours every day I read under the Mediterranean
sun next to the Olympic-sized pool.
Maybe not coincidentally, the library featured a few copies of
Thomas More’s Utopia. In both high school and college but we were
taught that such a place couldn’t exist. Indeed, More coined the term,
a neologism from Greek which meant “no place,” indicating that he
was not so sure such perfection could exist on Earth. He described a
mythical land named Utopia somewhere in the ancient Persian
empire that had the most smoothly functioning, peaceful society
imaginable. More described the qualities and designs that this
imagined society might boast. Maybe I wasn’t the first to think so,
but More’s Utopia seemed to bear striking similarities to modern
kibbutzim. Utopia was based on agriculture, with the workers—both
male and female—only working a limited number of hours per day;
the females generally performed the same work as the males;
ownership of private property was discouraged, and as status
symbols earned no undue respect, accumulation of possessions
rarely occurred; intellectual pursuits were greatly encouraged and
were a revered source of recreation; individual farming communities
were separated by the proverbial “good fences” but were close
enough to others should anyone need assistance or just a nice chat;
there was no wasted effort or overindulgence; fulfillment of
responsibility was revered as paramount; disciplinary actions in
most cases taken care of from within the local community. The
BIG AMERICAN BREAKFAST
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