“In Thomas More’s Utopia separation was the founding gesture: Utopus Rex commanded a trench be dug to cut Utopia off from the mainland. A friend of Erasmus, reviewing Moore’s Utopia, described this in a dedicatory poem:
Me, once a peninsula,
Utopus Rex made an island.
Alone among all nations,
without complex abstraction
I set the philosophical city
before the human reader.I give freely;
and if you have better ideasI’m all ears.
Erasmus and friends were perpetuating a hoax – or perhaps it would be more accurate to say they were suggesting one – refusing to dispel the thought formed by some naifs that Utopia was a real place.”
(Bob Perelman, pp. 117–118 in The Grand Piano, part 4.)
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