My in-laws have a house in Florida, in a gated community that is home, or second-home, they told me, to 3,200 families. It is a colonial outpost in the midst of a colonial outpost in the midst of a colonial outpost and as such, is not only garrisoned, but protected within, from the individually destructive tendencies of its inhabitants, by a comprehensive series of rules governing the appearance of every house and person on its grounds.

So much of the earth is under our control here. Not the clouds, which pass, unpleasantly, before the sun, nor the fire ants, which hide and wait in the ground, nor death’s harbinger, incontinence, which is precisely a lack of control and should not, signs beg us, happen in the pools. Everything else has been, within the gates, manufactured or altered to exact specifications. Plant height and placement, water temperature, the grade of the paths, the ducks on the pond, which are fakes, the warm towels, hair salon, nail salon, massage palace, places to drink, places to eat, the outside impermanent movie theater and some wandering drinks bringers, not to mention the four golf courses and thirty tennis courts, built in a crescendo of control over the elements, and maintained in this ecstasy, are there for us, when we want them.

Since I was there last, my father-in-law tells me, twenty-six million dollars have been spent improving the facilities, a project that has just been concluded. For the most part I couldn’t tell, without him pointing it out to me, what had changed. Poverty could destroy this place, or a natural disaster, and individuals will of course pass on from it, individually. It is possible to imagine, though, that the members of this community, united in the interests of pleasure, comfort, and financial well-being, have created an example of human achievement that will last almost as long as a poem lasts, or a book.