![]() For four years, More (a Catholic English lawyer, statesman and humanist who was canonized in 1935), lived with the Carthusians, the strictest of orders, where the enclosed monks practice solitude and silence, and refer to each other as ‘hermits’: like molluscs in shell-cells. Hythloday argues that personal property must be abolished in order to achieve Utopia, which is not so far from a monk practising religious withdrawal and constructing an entire inner world. When Hythloday speaks of Utopia, More feels as if he is somehow ‘a child’ in his ‘own native land once more’. Remote islands, as Roland Barthes writes in Mythologies (1957), are not only associated with adventure: they also offer a delight in the finite - not unlike the ‘childhood passion for cabins and tents: to enclose oneself and to settle - such is the existential dream of childhood’. Courtesy: © The Frick Collection, New York Hans Holbein the Younger, Sir Thomas More, 1527, oil on oak panel, 75 x 60 cm. This cipher-writing further enclosed the Utopians - who had remained protected for centuries - from the outside world. More even invented an alphabet for his Utopians, with affinities with Greek and Latin. The story of Utopia is told to Thomas More, the author of the book, and Thomas More, a dramatic character within it - by a kind of pilgrim, Raphael Hythloday, whose name is another portmanteau, this time connoting ‘nonsense peddler’. The word also puns on another Greek compound, eu-topia, which means a ‘happy’ or ‘fortunate’ place. More invented the word Utopia by fusing the Greek adverb ou (meaning ‘not’) with the noun topos (meaning ‘place’) and then giving it a Latin ending. (‘Where is Neverland? Second to the right,’ said Peter, ‘and then straight on till morning.’) Literature has a fascination for isolated islands, their remoteness and self-contained cosmogonies: Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island (1874), Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Paul and Virginia (1787), Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and J.M. ![]() More’s map of the island, included with the publication of Utopia, is as useless as Lewis Carroll’s Ocean Chart map of nothing in his nonsense poem, Hunting of the Snark (1876). The Utopians live on an island, somewhere in the New World, far out of reach, in seas unknown. ![]() (Originally published in Latin, the book was first translated into English in 1551.) Today, More’s famous book is simply called Utopia. In December 1516, Utopia emerged from its shell (amorphous, imperfect, unblushing, flabby, ascetic) as Thomas More’s On the Best State of a Commonwealth and on the New Island of Utopia: A Truly Golden Handbook, No Less Beneficial than Entertaining.
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