Author: E. M. Forster
notes
- Speculative fiction
- Isolation
- When man transcends nature, what’s left of man?
- Shunning the Earth and the stars, ancestors and generations of human spirit
- Veneration of ideas over experience
- Getting in so deep, not seeing the bigger picture, loss of human spirit, complete technologizing, allowing technology to dominate mankind
- Dependency of man on technology
- Contingency plans
- Man must ultimately rely on himself
- For what are we developing technology for? To make life easier? But what is the purpose of life? Of work, of passion, of humanity?
- Dependency of man on technology
- A reflection on what makes us human by envisioning a future where all elements of humanity are systematically eradicated
- What’s not there?
- Personalization
- Sense of surveillance state
thoughts
- I wish they expanded more on the Homeless and the woman Kuno met on the surface
- Beatrice figure
highlights
I don’t think you irreligious, for there is no such thing as religion left. – p. 99
Note: culmination of disenchantment, a new object of worship, empty
Man is the measure. That was my first lesson. Man’s feet are the measure for distance, his hands are the measure for ownership, his body is the measure for all that is lovable and desirable and strong. – p. 100
The mortar had somehow rotted, and I soon pushed some more tiles in, and clambered after them into the darkness, and the spirits of the dead comforted me. I don’t know what I mean by that. I just say what I felt. I felt, for the first time, that a protest had been lodged against corruption, and that even as the dead were comforting me, so I was comforting the unborn. I felt that humanity existed, and that it existed without clothes. How can I possibly explain this It was naked, humanity seemed naked, and all these tubes and buttons and machineries neither came into the world with us, nor will they follow us out, nor do they matter supremely while we are here. – p. 102
Note: a veil between past and present, cutting off the lifeline of humanity (page=2)
But to me they were living and the turf that covered them was a skin, under which their muscles rippled, and I felt that 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. – p. 106
And behind all the uproar was silence—the silence which is the voice of the earth and of the generations who have gone. – p. 120
*** Man, the flower of all flesh, the noblest of all creatures visible, man who had once made god in his image, and had mirrored his strength on the constellations, beautiful naked man was dying, strangled in the garments that he had woven. Century after century had he toiled, and here was his reward. Truly the garment had seemed heavenly at first, shot with the colours of culture, sewn with the threads of self-denial. And heavenly it had been so long as it was a garment and no more, so long as man could shed it at will and live by the essence that is his soul, and the essence, equally divine, that is his body. The sin against the body— it was for that they wept in chief; the centuries of wrong against the muscles and the nerves, and those five portals by which we can alone apprehend—glossing it over with talk of evolution, until the body was white pap, the home of ideas as colourless, last sloshy stirrings of a spirit that had grasped the stars. – p. 121–122
Note: Ode to Man