Several years ago I found that cramming a large table into a small room greatly increased the size of the room. The table invited conversation, ideas, and laughter much more easily than I did. It was a Wednesday in September of 1991 when friends and I first wrestled a wooden spool top up the stairs, oblivious in our excitement to its splinters and rusted nails. By nightfall we had calmed it with offerings of spilled candle wax and red wine. By ten there had begun what came to be known as the Utopia Round Table Meetings.These meetings, more or less centered on figuring out what the idea of utopia was all about, were the best discussions I ever had at Harvard. They would begin tennish every Wednesday and last to the wee hours of the morning. We were not beyond including course material or reading out loud from books, nor were we beyond moaning about relationships gone sour, or abandoning words altogether to play chess. The conversations were intense and spectacular, charged with the unspoken understanding that the round-table meetings themselves were a kind of utopia. Every week we tossed around notions of community and tradition, stability and sterility, free will and free love. Toward the end of the year the meetings felt as if they were rolling toward some kind of climax. Very late drillpressspeedchart one night, with the sun just peeking through the Boston skyscrapers, we put all differences aside and promised to meet in Baja (why Baja, I don''t know) after we had graduated. Amid daring speeches and solemn oaths we signed our names on the wall committing ourselves to launching the real thing--the real Utopia--no matter who we became in the between years.

I have now begun building a traveling commons--an eight-foot round redwood table atop four wheels and a car engine. I, and whoever else ends up joining me, will drive the table around the world. Talking, cooking, writing, sculpting, playing billiards ... the table escapes narrow definition of purpose.It drillpressspeedchart will be a drama in which many people, with all their stories and concerns, thoughts and passions, will be the actors, the landscapes, the backdrops. It will be a community based on what people have to give--and there is everything to give. Some may offer food, wine, and a place to park; others, content and inspiration. The traveling commons is the stone in stone soup, the sand in the oyster. It is a magic carpet that flies--not above people, but through and within them. There will be a library, dictionary, drillpressspeedchart typewriters, cameras, easels, and elegant china stored in compartments below deck. We will stop at universities, parks, capitals, housing developments, and sometimes even red lights--the traveling commons transcends class and country. We might drillpressspeedchart stay in a place for weeks, or just a couple of minutes. As we gain recognition, and take on the momentum (wobble?) of a pottery wheel, we will sometimes write ahead, inviting artists, writers, and thinkers for a meal and a chat. Over the engine, using the heat of combustion, we will bake bread and make coffee. We may also have a zucchini or two growing in a well in the center of the table.

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