More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
“Actually, it is kind of incredible that things were ever any other way, isn’t it? It was so ridiculous to have people stuck in one place all day, just using their senses, then a reflex, using their senses, then a reflex, and not really thinking at all.”
“If I tell you something for your own good, promise not to get mad?” “No.” “All right, I’ll tell you anyway.
“Takaru,” said Khashdrahr. “Slave.” “No Takaru,” said Halyard, speaking directly to the Shah. “Ci-ti-zen.” “Ahhhhh,” said the Shah. “Ci-ti-zen.” He grinned happily. “Takaru—citizen. Citizen—Takaru.” “No Takaru!” said Halyard.
“Makes you feel kind of creepy, don’t it, Doctor, watching them keys go up and down? You can almost see a ghost sitting there playing his heart out.”
With inhuman intuition, Finnerty could sense the basic principles and motives of almost any human work, not just engineering.
Paul could have been only what he was, he thought. As he filled his glass again, he supposed that he could only have come to this moment, this living room, into the presence of Anita. It was an appalling thought, to be so well-integrated into the machinery of society and history as to be able to move in only one plane, and along one line. Finnerty’s arrival was disturbing, for it brought to the surface the doubt that life should be that way.
“Sick of it,” he said slowly. “The pay was fantastically good, ridiculously good—paid like a television queen with a forty-inch bust. But when I got this year’s invitation to the Meadows, Paul, something snapped. I realized I couldn’t face another session up there. And then I looked around me and found out I couldn’t face anything about the system any more. I walked out, and here I am.”
Baer embodied the knowledge and technique of industry; Kroner personified the faith, the near-holiness, the spirit of the complicated venture. Kroner, in fact, had a poor record as an engineer and had surprised Paul from time to time with his ignorance or misunderstanding of technical matters; but he had the priceless quality of believing in the system, and of making others believe in it, too, and do as they were told.
Moreover—Paul’s thoughts were coming alive as though refreshed by a cool wind—there was enchantment in what Finnerty had done, a thing almost as inconceivable and beautifully simple as suicide: he’d quit.
He could handle his assignments all right, but he didn’t have what his father had, what Kroner had, what Shepherd had, what so many had: the sense of spiritual importance in what they were doing; the ability to be moved emotionally, almost like a lover, by the great omnipresent and omniscient spook, the corporate personality.
In short, Paul missed what made his father aggressive and great: the capacity to really give a damn.
Washington is worse, Paul—Ilium to the tenth power. Stupid, arrogant, self-congratulatory, unimaginative, humorless men.
Maybe the actual jobs weren’t being taken from the people, but the sense of participation, the sense of importance was.
Even then, half the people or more didn’t understand much about the machines they worked at or the things they were making. They were participating in the economy all right, but not in a way that was very satisfying to the ego.
It isn’t knowledge that’s making trouble, but the uses it’s put to.”
“Sooner or later someone’s going to catch the imagination of these people with some new magic. At the bottom of it will be a promise of regaining the feeling of participation, the feeling of being needed on earth—hell, dignity.
the smarter you are, the better you are. Used to be that the richer you were, the better you were. Either one is, you’ll admit, pretty tough for the have-not’s to take. The criterion of brains is better than the one of money, but”—he held his thumb and forefinger about a sixteenth of an inch apart—“about that much better.”
“It’s about as rigid a hierarchy as you can get,” said Finnerty. “How’s somebody going to up his I.Q.?” “Exactly,”
It was a large, airy room, larger than most living rooms. Rough-hewn rafters, taken from an antique barn, were held against the ceiling by concealed bolts fixed in the steel framing of the house. The walls were wainscoted in pine, aged by sandblasting, and given a soft yellow patina of linseed oil. A huge fireplace and Dutch oven of fieldstone filled one wall. Over them hung a long muzzle-loading rifle, powder horn, and bullet pouch. On the mantel were candle molds, a coffee mill, an iron and trivet, and a rusty kettle. An iron cauldron, big enough to boil a missionary in, swung at the end of
...more
Paul did a complicated sum in his mind—his savings account plus his securities plus his house plus his cars—and wondered if he didn’t have enough to enable him simply to quit, to stop being the instrument of any set of beliefs or any whim of history that might raise hell with somebody’s life. To live in a house by the side of a road….
The mansion was one more affirmation of Kroner’s belief that nothing of value changed; that what was once true is always true; that truths were few and simple; and that a man needed no knowledge beyond these truths to deal wisely and justly with any problem whatsoever.
Kroner had a habit of saying he already knew what he’d just been told.
Paul leaned forward, eager to hear what this extra quality might be. He’d felt for some time that everyone else in the system must be seeing something he was missing.
He wondered if Baer had come in on cue.
Paul reflected that the big trouble, really, was finding something to believe in.
He looked back and forth between Paul and Doctor Pond, waiting for them to say something worth his attention. When they’d failed to rally after twenty seconds, he turned to go. “I’m doctor of cowshit, pigshit, and chickenshit,” he said. “When you doctors figure out what you want, you’ll find me out in the barn shoveling my thesis.”
“His standard of living is constantly rising, and he and the country at large are protected from the old economic ups and downs by the orderly, predictable consumer habits the payroll machines give him. Used to be he’d buy on impulse, illogically, and industry would go nutty trying to figure out what he was going to buy next. Why, I remember when I was a little boy, we had a crazy neighbor who blew all his money on an electric organ, while he still had an old-fashioned icebox and kerosene stove in his kitchen!”
“There! You made my point for me. You said, what else could we give them, as though everything in the world were ours to give or withhold.”
He’s you, John! If I can’t give you what you want, I’m through. We’re all through, and down comes the star.
the past, the keynote plays have been written by professional writers under our supervision. This play you’ve just seen was written, believe it or not, by an engineer and manager within the organization!
And the good offices of the cocktail hour were wearing away.
“Everybody’s shaking in his boots, so don’t be bluffed.”
“Show me a specialist, and I’ll show you a man who’s so scared he’s dug a hole for himself to hide in.”
If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you’re a one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind.”
“If we fire you. As of now, as far as anyone outside this room knows, you’re through.
If I had the money, sometimes I think maybe I’d throw this—”
Don’t put one foot in your job and the other in your dreams, Ed. Go ahead and quit, or resign yourself to this life. It’s just too much of a temptation for fate to split you right up the middle before you’ve made up your mind which way to go.”
And my husband says somebody’s just got to be maladjusted; that somebody’s got to be uncomfortable enough to wonder where people are, where they’re going, and why they’re going there.
You can’t play college football, and go to school. They tried that once, and you know what a silly mess that was.”
“Men, by their nature, seemingly, cannot be happy unless engaged in enterprises that make them feel useful. They must, therefore, be returned to participation in such enterprises.
