A FRIEND OF MINE once dated a man who lived in a geodesic dome. I was slightly afraid to meet him; I’d never met anyone who lived in a geodesic dome before. For some reason, I pictured him permanently wearing a white lab coat. Some godlike figure, with a head as majestically bulbous as his house: the Dome Man, citizen of tomorrow. But when I was finally introduced to the dome dweller, he didn’t live up to my expectations. A slight, shy, almost entirely silent man with the wide-eyed, hunted look of a small woodland creature. As I later found out, that was essentially what he was.
The Dome Man had grown up in a hippie commune in the south of England. Back in the 1970s, a group of beautiful young people had been given an old gamekeeper’s cottage on a local aristocrat’s estate so they could live a more beautiful kind of life. They didn’t want to sacrifice their youth to some office or factory, build up their own miserable little pile of wealth, get married, buy a pebble-dashed house in the suburbs, and sit in there while slowly, over the course of a thousand beef dinners…