Call me a pessimist – who tries damned hard to stay optimistic – but I can’t help but think to E.M. Forster’s short story, “The Machine Stops” in these teetering, brink-of-economic collapse, times.
Forster’s futuristic tale, written in 1909, is a Sci-Fi look at a society evolved to the point that it’s no longer connected to all things human – including each other – but has “freed” itself to spend sprawling hours pondering greater thoughts while machines, which they no longer understand, take care of their basic needs, including selective reproduction.
But in this world, one need not care for children, which are tended by the machine. Rather, they sit in their pods, day after day, pondering great thoughts and speaking to others only via the machine, which drones and tends to their every human need — sorta. Until it grinds to a screeching halt — and clawing humans, unprepared, are on their own.
I was reminded of the tale last night on a 10 p.m. walk with Zeus, The Power Pug. Above the humming streetlights, across a blackened sky, stars flickered and sparkled in an expansive canopy.
Most things scientific boggle and hurt my brain, but I get enough to know that the light show that I enjoyed in that moment was borne in a moment so long ago that I cannot comprehend or fully understand. Some of those stars are gone now, others have changed. But all of them took untold light-years to create their moment, which intersected with mine.
As our financial machine stops, our paradigms shift (damned I hate that corporate co-opted word, which summons up images of teamwork posters, but it works here – I think), and our politicians scramble to patch up the Humpty Dumpty that we call Wall Street, I’m holding on to faint optimism that we’ll get reaquatinted with the basics of humanity – things that can’t be charged, fueled up or bought, at any price. Things like gazing at stars, pondering one’s place in the universal spectrum of it all and cupping a warm hand.
Take a look outside this evening.
I’ll be wishing on a shooting star. And listening to Mary Chapin Carpenter’s “Bright Morning Star.”
-Christy
Filed under: Books, Butterflies, conversation | Tagged: Bright Morning Star, crash, E.M. Forster, Financial mess, Human, Mary Chapin Carpenter, moments, optimist, stars, The Machine Stops, Wall Street crisis
