...And Melt With You
Depending on the situation, people find it either hilarious or profoundly inconvenient that I won't get a crackberry, cell phone or other mobile communications device, much less open up a simple automatic messenger window from time to time. Thanks to the vast but not infinite benevolence of the Internet (praise the Internet!), the unquiet shade of legendary Edwardian and neglected telecoms visionary E.M. Forster will help me explain.
(from "The Machine Stops," originally published 1909)
Imagine, if you can, a small room, hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a bee. It is lighted neither by window nor by lamp, yet it is filled with a soft radiance. There are no apertures for ventilation, yet the air is fresh. There are no musical instruments, and yet, at the moment that my meditation opens, this room is throbbing with melodious sounds. An armchair is in the centre, by its side a reading-desk -- that is all the furniture. And in the armchair there sits a swaddled lump of flesh -- a woman, about five feet high, with a face as white as a fungus. It is to her that the little room belongs.
[Her] next move was to turn off the isolation switch, and all the accumulations of the last three minutes burst upon her. The room was filled with the noise of bells, and speaking-tubes. What was the new food like? Could she recommend it? Has she had any ideas lately? Might one tell her one's own ideas? Would she make an engagement to visit the public nurseries at an early date?-- say this day month.
To most of these questions she replied with irritation.
Eventually, of course, the Machine "stops" and the forest reclaims the world.
Mystères de la forêt: who has a set of Minotaure from 1934? Anyone?
"The luminous coyote and the hilltop where I stood melted away. I had no thoughts or feelings. Everything had been turned off and I was floating freely. . . . 'You have simply stopped the world,' [Don Juan] commented after I had finished my account."
(from "The Machine Stops," originally published 1909)
Imagine, if you can, a small room, hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a bee. It is lighted neither by window nor by lamp, yet it is filled with a soft radiance. There are no apertures for ventilation, yet the air is fresh. There are no musical instruments, and yet, at the moment that my meditation opens, this room is throbbing with melodious sounds. An armchair is in the centre, by its side a reading-desk -- that is all the furniture. And in the armchair there sits a swaddled lump of flesh -- a woman, about five feet high, with a face as white as a fungus. It is to her that the little room belongs.
[Her] next move was to turn off the isolation switch, and all the accumulations of the last three minutes burst upon her. The room was filled with the noise of bells, and speaking-tubes. What was the new food like? Could she recommend it? Has she had any ideas lately? Might one tell her one's own ideas? Would she make an engagement to visit the public nurseries at an early date?-- say this day month.
To most of these questions she replied with irritation.
Eventually, of course, the Machine "stops" and the forest reclaims the world.
Mystères de la forêt: who has a set of Minotaure from 1934? Anyone?
"The luminous coyote and the hilltop where I stood melted away. I had no thoughts or feelings. Everything had been turned off and I was floating freely. . . . 'You have simply stopped the world,' [Don Juan] commented after I had finished my account."