The Human Machine | Page 2

long letters to the Telegraph as to life being worth
living or not worth living; and there was naught to be done but face the
grey, monotonous future, and pretend to be cheerful with the worm of
ennui gnawing at your heart! In a word, the moment when it occurred
to you that yours is 'the common lot.' In that moment have you not
wished--do you not continually wish--for an exhaustless machine, a
machine that you could never get to the end of? Would you not give
your head to be lying on the flat of your back, peering with a candle,
dirty, foiled, catching cold--but absorbed in the pursuit of an object?
Have you not gloomily regretted that you were born without a
mechanical turn, because there is really something about a machine...?
It has never struck you that you do possess a machine! Oh, blind! Oh,
dull! It has never struck you that you have at hand a machine wonderful
beyond all mechanisms in sheds, intricate, delicately adjustable, of
astounding and miraculous possibilities, interminably interesting! That
machine is yourself. 'This fellow is preaching. I won't have it!' you
exclaim resentfully. Dear sir, I am not preaching, and, even if I were, I
think you would have it. I think I can anyhow keep hold of your button

for a while, though you pull hard. I am not preaching. I am simply bent
on calling your attention to a fact which has perhaps wholly or partially
escaped you--namely, that you are the most fascinating bit of
machinery that ever was. You do yourself less than justice. It is said
that men are only interested in themselves. The truth is that, as a rule,
men are interested in every mortal thing except themselves. They have
a habit of taking themselves for granted, and that habit is responsible
for nine-tenths of the boredom and despair on the face of the planet.
A man will wake up in the middle of the night (usually owing to some
form of delightful excess), and his brain will be very active indeed for a
space ere he can go to sleep again. In that candid hour, after the
exaltation of the evening and before the hope of the dawn, he will see
everything in its true colours--except himself. There is nothing like a
sleepless couch for a clear vision of one's environment. He will see all
his wife's faults and the hopelessness of trying to cure them. He will
momentarily see, though with less sharpness of outline, his own faults.
He will probably decide that the anxieties of children outweigh the joys
connected with children. He will admit all the shortcomings of
existence, will face them like a man, grimly, sourly, in a sturdy despair.
He will mutter: 'Of course I'm angry! Who wouldn't be? Of course I'm
disappointed! Did I expect this twenty years ago? Yes, we ought to
save more. But we don't, so there you are! I'm bound to worry! I know I
should be better if I didn't smoke so much. I know there's absolutely no
sense at all in taking liqueurs. Absurd to be ruffled with her when she's
in one of her moods. I don't have enough exercise. Can't be regular,
somehow. Not the slightest use hoping that things will be different,
because I know they won't. Queer world! Never really what you may
call happy, you know. Now, if things were different ...' He loses
consciousness.
Observe: he has taken himself for granted, just glancing at his faults
and looking away again. It is his environment that has occupied his
attention, and his environment--'things'--that he would wish to have
'different,' did he not know, out of the fulness of experience, that it is
futile to desire such a change? What he wants is a pipe that won't put
itself into his mouth, a glass that won't leap of its own accord to his lips,

money that won't slip untouched out of his pocket, legs that without
asking will carry him certain miles every day in the open air, habits that
practise themselves, a wife that will expand and contract according to
his humours, like a Wernicke bookcase, always complete but never
finished. Wise man, he perceives at once that he can't have these things.
And so he resigns himself to the universe, and settles down to a
permanent, restrained discontent. No one shall say he is unreasonable.
You see, he has given no attention to the machine. Let us not call it a
flying-machine. Let us call it simply an automobile. There it is on the
road, jolting, screeching, rattling, perfuming. And there he is, saying:
'This road ought to be as smooth as velvet. That hill in front is
ridiculous, and the descent on the other side positively dangerous.