The Machine Stops

by E.M. Forster

"I want to speak to you not through the wearisome Machine."

The imponderable bloom, declared by a discredited philosophy to be the actual essence of intercourse, was rightly ignored by the Machine, just as the imponderable bloom of the grape was ignored by the manufacturers of artificial fruit.

irritation--a growing quality in that accelerated age.

the civilization that had mistaken the functions of the system, and had used it for bringing people to things, instead of for bringing things to people.

What was the good of going to Peking when it was just like Shrewsbury?

all unrest was concentrated in the soul.

cinematophote.

spasms of rage shook her.

in each room there sat a human being, eating, or sleeping, or producing ideas.

Science could prolong the night, but only for a little,

In the plain were seen the ruins of cities, with diminished rivers creeping by their walls, and by the sides of these were sometimes the signs of vomitories, marking the cities of to day.

"No ideas here,"

these days it was a demerit to be muscular.

those hills had called with incalculable force to men in the past, and that men had loved them. Now they sleep--perhaps for ever. They commune with humanity in dreams. Happy the man, happy the woman, who awakes the hills of Wessex. For though they sleep, they will never die."

"Beware of first-hand ideas!"

"First-hand ideas do not really exist. They are but the physical impressions produced by live and fear, and on this gross foundation who could erect a philosophy? Let your ideas be second-hand, and if possible tenth-hand, for then they will be far removed from that disturbing element--direct observation.

be sure that the intermediates are many and varied, for in history one authority exists to counteract another.

And so with the moldy artificial fruit, so with the bath water that began to stink, so with the defective rhymes that the poetry machine had taken to emit, all were bitterly complained of at first, and then acquiesced in and forgotten. Things went from bad to worse unchallenged.

pain had reappeared among men.