Wednesday, November 29, 2017

the machine stops

Why cannot we suffer in silence?

And even the lecturers acquiesced when they found that a lecture on the sea was none the less stimulating when compiled out of other lectures that had already been delivered on the same subject.

“Beware of first-hand ideas!” exclaimed one of the most advanced of them. “First-hand ideas do not really exist. They are but the physical impressions produced by love and fear, and on this gross foundation who could erect a philosophy?

“there will come a generation that had got beyond facts, beyond impressions, a generation absolutely colourless, a generation
‘seraphically free
From taint of personality,’ [George Meredith]
which will see the French Revolution not as it happened, nor as they would like it to have happened, but as it would have happened...”

...terrestrial facts must be ignored

The second great development was the re-establishment of religion.

... the ecstasy of touching a button

The Central Committee

Committee of the Mending Apparatus

Humanity, in its desire for comfort, had over-reached itself. It had exploited the riches of nature too far. Quietly and complacently, it was sinking into decadence, and progress had come to mean the progress of the Machine.

“Some one is meddling with the Machine"

The Machine Stops by by E.M. Forster, 1909

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