Here’s a light and humorous essay about becoming an American (or, if you prefer, an “American”) from The New York Times of 1987, by writer Miklós Vámos. It’s accompanied by a clever illustration by the multi-skilled, multi-faceted Terry Allen.
Enjoy the words.
And, enjoy the picture.
How I’ll Become an American Miklós Vámos
The New York Times April 17, 1987
NEW HAVEN
I have been Hungarian for 38 years. I’ll try something else for the next 38. I’ll try to be American, for instance. North American, I mean. As an American, I’ll speak English fluently. I’ll make American mistakes instead of Hungarian mistakes and I’ll call them slang. As an American, I’ll have a credit card. Or two. I’ll use and misuse them and have to pay the fees. I’ll apply for other cards right away. Golden Visa. Golden American. Golden Gate. And I’ll buy a car, a great American car. Then I’ll sell my car and buy a smaller West German car because it’s reliable and doesn’t use so much gasoline. Later, I’ll sell it and buy a smaller Japanese car with a computer aboard. Then I’ll sell it and buy a camper. When I sell the camper I’ll buy a bicycle.
As an American, I’ll buy a dog. And a cat. And a goat. And a white whale. And also some big stones as pets.
I’ll live in my own house. It will be mine, except for the 99 percent mortgage. I’ll sell my house and buy a condo. I’ll sell my condo and buy a mobile home. I’ll sell my mobile home and buy an igloo. I’ll sell my igloo and buy a tent. As an American, I’ll be clever: I’ll sell my igloo and buy a tent when I move to Florida from Alaska.
Anyway, I’ll move a lot. And I’ll buy the best dishwasher, microwave, dryer and hi-fi in the world — that is, the U.S.A. I’ll have warranty for all — or my money back. I’ll use automatic toothbrushes, egg boilers and garage doors. I’ll call every single phone number starting 1-800.
I’ll buy the fastest food I can get and I’ll eat it very slowly because I’ll watch TV during the meals. Of course, I’ll buy a VCR. I’ll watch the taped programs and then retape. Sometimes I’ll retape first.
As an American, I’ll have an answering machine, too. The outgoing message will promise that I’ll call you back as soon as possible, but it won’t be possible soon.
If I answer the phone as an exception, I’ll tell you that I can’t talk now because I have a long-distance call on the other line, but I’ll call you back as soon as possible (see above).
Illustration by Terry Allen
And I’ll get a job. I’ll always be looking for a better job, but I won’t get the job I want. I’ll work really hard since as an American I wanna be rich. I’ll be always in a hurry: Time Is Money. Unfortunately, my time won’t be worth as much money as my bosses’ time. Sometimes I will have some time and I still won’t have enough money. Then I’ll start to hate the wisdom of this saying.
As an American, sometimes I’ll be badly depressed. I’ll be the patient of 12 psychiatrists, and I’ll be disappointed with all of them. I’ll try to change my life a little bit. I’ll try to exchange my wives, my cars, my lovers, my houses, my children, my jobs and my pets.
Sometimes, I’ll exchange a few dollars into other currencies and I’ll travel to Europe, Hawaii, Tunisia, Martinique and Japan. I’ll be happy to see that people all over the world are jealous of us Americans.
I’ll take at least 2,000 snapshots on each trip. I’ll also buy a video camera and shoot everywhere. I’ll look at the tapes, photos and slides, and I’ll try to remember my experiences when I have time and am in the mood. But I won’t have time or be in the mood because I’ll get depressed again and again.
I’ll smoke cigarettes. Then I’ll be afraid of cancer and I’ll stop. I’ll smoke cigars. And opium. I’ll take a breather and then try LSD and heroin and cocaine and marijuana. To top it all off: crack. I’ll try to stop then but I won’t be able.
I’ll call 1-800-222-HELP. If nothing helps, I’ll have some gay experiences. And swing. And if I am still unhappy, I’ll make a final effort: I’ll try to read a book. I’ll buy some best sellers. I’ll prefer James A. Michener. My second favorite will be the “How to Be Rich in Seven Weeks.” I’ll try to follow this advice in seven years.
I’ll always be concerned about my health as an American. I won’t eat anything but health food until I get ill. From time to time, I’ll read in the paper that I should stop eating meat sugar, bread, fiber, grains, iron toothpaste, and that I should stop drinking milk, soda, water, acid rain. I’ll try to follow this advice, but then I’ll read in the paper that I should do it the other way around.
I’ll be puzzled. “Hey, I don’t even know what cholesterol is!” Yet I’ll stick to decaf coffee, sugar-free cookies, salt-free butter and lead-free gasoline. I’ll believe that proper diet and exercise make life longer. I’ll go jogging every day until I am mugged twice and knocked down three times. Then I’ll just exercise in my room, but it will also increase my appetite. I’ll go on several diets, and little by little I’ll reach 200 pounds.
As an American, I’ll buy a new TV every time a larger screen appears on the market. In the end, the screen will be larger than the room. It will be difficult to put this enormous TV into my living room; thus, I will put my living room into the TV. Anyway, my living room will look very much like the living rooms you can see on the screen. My life won’t differ from the lives you can see in the soaps: nobody will complain. I won’t complain either. I’ll always smile.
After all, we are Americans, aren’t we?
Miklos Vamos, a Hungarian novelist and playwright, is spending the year at the Yale School of Drama.
Here, in this house, you shall meet the first sketch of the real God. It is a man — or a being made by man — who will finally ascend the throne of the universe. And rule forever.
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No, no; we want geldings and oxen. There will never be peace and order and discipline so long as there is sex. When man has thrown it away, then he will become finally governable.
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But the educated public, the people who read the highbrow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They’re all right already. They’ll believe anything.
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What’s on a book is interesting (hey, that’s why this blog’s here!) but it’s what’s inside that really counts. Some novels; some stories are so compelling that the message they present – whether explicitly or implicitly – demands acknowledgement; demands recognition; demands contemplation. This is so regardless of a tale’s format, physical quality, or (sometimes being generous!) literary venue. In some pulp fiction, there has been profundity. In a few cheap paperbacks, there has been prescience. And even in some works of mainstream fiction, there can be (on infrequent occasion!) meaning. Such as, in the four examples below: Two pulps; a mainstream novel; a cheap paperback. While they certainly merit notice of their cover art, it’s the commonality – expressed in different degrees of sophistication and style – of their understanding of the intersection between human nature, technology, and civilization, and the endurance of civilization, for which they should be recognized.
So, each post features images of the book or pulp’s cover art, followed by a whole, long, big bunch of excerpts.
… some worthy quotes from That Hideous Strength, the trilogy’s final novel, follow below.
But first…!
here’s George Orwell’s review of the novel from the Manchester Evening News of August 16, 1945, published one day after Emperor Hirohito’s radio broadcast concerning the termination of WW II. A strange and subtle synchronicity, eh? Orwell’s opinion of Lewis’ novel is generally positive, but his criticisms of the magical and supernatural elements in the story are, I think, unwarranted and strangely naive, especially coming from a man of such shining literary skill and moral sensitivity. (I recently finished The Road to Wigan Pier, and, Homage to Catalonia, both of which clearly reveal Orwell’s intellectual honesty, compassion, and political wisdom.) After all, it was Lewis’ specific and deliberate intention – having successively “segued” from Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra – to combine elements of science-fiction, fantasy, and the supernatural as a warning about the dangers of deification of the human intellect, the seductiveness of power – and especially the desire to feel that one is among a society’s elect, and, an entirely mechanistic view of reality.
Here’s the review…
The Scientist Takes Over
(Reprinted as No. 2720 (first half) in The Complete Works of George Orwell, edited by Peter Davison, Vol. XVII (1998), pp. 250–251)
On the whole, novels are better when there are no miracles in them. Still, it is possible to think of a fairly large number of worth-while books in which ghosts, magic, second-sight, angels, mermaids, and what-not play a part.
Mr. C.S. Lewis’s “That Hideous Strength” can be included in their number – though, curiously enough, it would probably have been a better book if the magical element had been left out. For in essence it is a crime story, and the miraculous happenings, though they grow more frequent towards the end, are not integral to it.
In general outline, and to some extent in atmosphere, it rather resembles G.K. Chesterton’s “The Man Who Was Thursday.”
Mr. Lewis probably owes something to Chesterton as a writer, and certainly shares his horror of modern machine civilisation (the title of the book, by the way, is taken from a poem about the Tower of Babel) and his reliance on the “eternal verities” of the Christian Church, as against scientific materialism or nihilism.
His book describes the struggle of a little group of sane people against a nightmare that nearly conquers the world. A company of mad scientists – or, perhaps, they are not mad, but have merely destroyed in themselves all human feeling, all notion of good and evil – are plotting to conquer Britain, then the whole planet, and then other planets, until they have brought the universe under their control.
All superfluous life is to be wiped out, all natural forces tamed, the common people are to be used as slaves and vivisection subjects by the ruling caste of scientists, who even see their way to conferring immortal life upon themselves. Man, in short, is to storm the heavens and overthrow the gods, or even to become a god himself.
There is nothing outrageously improbable in such a conspiracy. Indeed, at a moment when a single atomic bomb – of a type already pronounced “obsolete” – has just blown probably three hundred thousand people to fragments, it sounds all too topical. Plenty of people in our age do entertain the monstrous dreams of power that Mr. Lewis attributes to his characters, and we are within sight of the time when such dreams will be realisable.
His description of the N.I.C.E. (National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments), with its world-wide ramifications, its private army, its secret torture chambers, and its inner ring of adepts ruled over by a mysterious personage known as The Head, is as exciting as any detective story.
It would be a very hardened reader who would not experience a thrill on learning that The Head is actually – however, that would be giving the game away.
One could recommend this book unreservedly if Mr. Lewis had succeeded in keeping it all on a single level. Unfortunately, the supernatural keeps breaking in, and it does so in rather confusing, undisciplined ways. The scientists are endeavouring, among other things, to get hold of the body of the ancient Celtic magician Merlin, who has been buried – not dead, but in a trance – for the last 1,500 years, in hopes of learning from him the secrets of pre-Christian magic.
They are frustrated by a character who is only doubtfully a human being, having spent part of his time on another planet where he has been gifted with eternal youth. Then there is a woman with second sight, one or two ghosts, and various superhuman visitors from outer space, some of them with rather tiresome names which derive from earlier books of Mr. Lewis’s. The book ends in a way that is so preposterous that it does not even succeed in being horrible in spite of much bloodshed.
Much is made of the fact that the scientists are actually in touch with evil spirits, although this fact is known only to the inmost circle. Mr. Lewis appears to believe in the existence of such spirits, and of benevolent ones as well. He is entitled to his beliefs, but they weaken his story, not only because they offend the average reader’s sense of probability but because in effect they decide the issue in advance. When one is told that God and the Devil are in conflict one always knows which side is going to win. The whole drama of the struggle against evil lies in the fact that one does not have supernatural aid. However, by the standard of the novels appearing nowadays this is a book worth reading.
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This post concludes with a bunch of references to commentary about and discussion of the novel, the most recent of which are N.S. Lyons’ profound “A Prophecy of Evil: Tolkien, Lewis, and Technocratic Nihilism” – also available in podcast form via Audyo – and Rusty Reno’s “That Haunting Nihilism“. (Admittedly, the very title of Lyons’ post inspired the leading word in this post’s title: Technonihilism. One must give credit where credit’s due!)
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But First, Some Thing to Watch
So, to (try!) to begin on a note of levity, what better way than to poke fun at sciencescientism than by Thomas Dolby’s “She Blinded Me With Science” (Official Video – HD Remaster – April 15, 2009), at Thomas Dolby Official?
After all, humor may be the refuge of the powerless, but it is a refuge nonetheless.
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And so, some quotes:
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The most controversial business before the College Meeting was the question of selling Bragdon Wood. The purchaser was the N.I.C.E., the National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments. They wanted a site for the building which would house this remarkable organisation. The N.I.C.E. was the first fruits of that constructive fusion between the state and the laboratory on which so many thoughtful people base their hopes of a better world. (23)
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Jewel had been already an old man in the days before the first war when old men were treated with kindness, and he had never succeeded in getting used to the modern world. (28)
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“And what do you think about it, Studdock?” said Feverstone.
“I think,” said Mark, “that James touched on the most important point when he said that it would have its own legal staff and its own police. I don’t give a fig for Pragmatometers and sanitation de luxe. The real thing is that this time we’re going to get science applied to social problems and backed by the whole force of the state, just as war has been backed by the whole force of the state in the past. One hopes, of course, that it’ll find out more than the old free-lance science did; but what’s certain is that it can do more.” (38)
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“But it is the main question at the moment: which side one’s on – obscurantism or Order. It does really look as if we now had the power to dig ourselves in as a species for a pretty staggering period, to take control of our own destiny. If Science is really given a free hand it can now take over the human race and re-condition it: make man a really efficient animal. If it doesn’t – well, we’re done.” (40-41)
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“It’s the real thing at last. A new type of man; and it’s people like you who’ve got to begin to make him.”
“The practical point is that you and I don’t like being pawns, and we do rather like fighting – especially on the winning side.”
“And what is the first practical step?”
“Yes, that’s the real question. As I said, the interplanetary problem must be left on the side for the moment. The second problem is our rivals on this planet. I don’t mean only insects and bacteria. There’s far too much life of every kind about, animal and vegetable. We haven’t really cleared the place yet. First we couldn’t; and then we had aesthetic and humanitarian scruples; and we still haven’t short-circuited the question of the balance of nature. All that is to be gone into. The third problem is Man himself.”
“Go on. This interests me very much.”
“Man has got to take charge of Man. That means, remember, that some men have got to take charge of the rest – which is another reason for cashing in on it as soon as you can. You and I want to be the people who do the taking charge, not the ones who are taken charge of. Quite.”
“What sort of things have you in mind?”
“Quite simple and obvious things, at first – sterilization of the unfit, liquidation of backward races (we don’t want any dead weights), selective breeding. Then real education, including pre-natal education. By real education I mean one that has no ‘take-it-or-leave-it’ nonsense. A real education makes the patient what it wants infallibly: whatever he or his parents try to do about it. Of course, it’ll be mainly psychological at first. But we’ll get on to biochemical conditioning in the end and direct manipulation of the brain…”
“But this is stupendous, Feverstone.”
“It’s the real thing at last. A new type of man; and it’s people like you who’ve got to begin to make him.” (42)
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“Is there, do you think, anything very seriously wrong with me?”
“There is nothing wrong with you,” said Miss Ironwood.
“You mean it will go away?”
“I have no means of telling. I should say probably not.”
Disappointment shadowed Jane’s face. “Then – can’t anything be done about it? They were horrible dreams – horribly vivid, not like dreams at all.”
“I can quite understand that.”
“Is it something that can’t be cured?”
“The reason you cannot be cured is that you are not ill.” (64)
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“But what is this all about?” said Jane “I want to lead an ordinary life. I want to do my own work. It’s unbearable! Why should I be selected for this horrible thing?”
“The answer to that is known only to authorities much higher than myself.” (66)
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“I happen to believe that you can’t study men; you can only get to know them, which is quite a different thing. Because you study them, you want to make the lower orders govern the country and listen to classical music, which is balderdash. You also want to take away from them everything which makes life worth living at not only from them but from everyone except a parcel of prigs and professors.” (71)
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They walked about that village for two hours and saw with their own eyes all the abuses and anachronisms they came to destroy. They saw the recalcitrant and backward labourer and heard his views on the weather. They met the wastefully supported pauper in the person of an old man shuffling across the courtyard of the almshouses to fill a kettle, and the elderly rentier (to make matters worse, she had a fat old dog with her) in earnest conversation with the postman. It made Mark feel as he were on a holiday, for it was only on holidays that he had ever wandered about an English village. For that reason he felt pleasure in it. It did not quite escape him that the face of the backward labourer was rather more interesting than Cosser’s and his voice a great deal more pleasing to the ear. The resemblance between the elderly rentier and Aunt Gilly (When had he last thought of her? Good Lord, that took one back.) did make him understand how it was possible to like that kind of person. All this did not in the least influence his sociological convictions. Even if he had been free from Belbury and wholly unambitious, it could not have done so, for his education had had the curious effect of making things that he read and wrote more real to him than things he saw. Statistics about agricultural labourers were the substance; any real ditcher, ploughman, or farmer’s boy, was the shadow. Though he had never noticed it himself, he had a great reluctance, in his work, ever to use such words as “man” or “woman,” He preferred to write about “vocational groups,” “elements,” “classes” and “populations”: for, in his own way, he believed as firmly as any mystic in the superior reality of the things that are not seen. (87)
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“Why you fool, it’s the educated reader who can be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they’re all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in May-fair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the highbrow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They’re all right already. They’ll believe anything.”
“Don’t you understand anything? Isn’t it absolutely essential to keep a fierce Left and a fierce Right, both on their toes and each terrified of the other? That’s how we get things done. Any opposition to the N.I.C.E. is represented as a Left racket in the Right papers and a Right racket in the Left papers. If it’s properly done, you get each side outbidding the other in support of us — to refute the enemy slanders. Of course we’re non-political. The real power always is.”
“I don’t believe you can do that,” said Mark. “Not with the papers that are read by educated people.”
“That shows you’re still in the nursery, lovey,” said Miss Hardcastle. “Haven’t you yet realised that it’s the other way round?”
“How do you mean?”
“Why you fool, it’s the educated reader who can be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they’re all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in May-fair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the highbrow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They’re all right already. They’ll believe anything.”
“As one of the class you mention,” said Mark with a smile, “I just don’t believe it.”
“Good Lord!” said the Fairy, “where are your eyes? Look at what the weeklies have got away with! Look at the Weekly Question. There’s a paper for you. When Basic English came in simply as the invention of a free-thinking Cambridge don, nothing was too good for it; as soon as it was taken up by a Tory Prime Minister it became a menace to the purity of our language. And wasn’t the Monarchy an expensive absurdity for ten years? And then, when the Duke of Windsor abdicated, didn’t the Question go all monarchist and legitimist for about a fortnight? Did they drop a single reader? Don’t you see that the educated reader can’t stop reading the high-brow weeklies whatever they do? He can’t. He’s been conditioned.” (99-100)
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Stone had the look which Mark had often seen before in unpopular boys or new boys at school, in “outsiders” at Bracton — the look which was for Mark the symbol of all his worst fears, for to be one who must wear that look was, in his scale of values, the greatest evil. His instinct was not to speak to this man Stone. He knew by experience how dangerous it is to be friends with a sinking man or even to be seen with him: you cannot keep him afloat and he may pull you under. But his own craving for companionship was now acute, so that against his better judgment he smiled a sickly — smile and said “Hullo!” (109)
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The least satisfactory member of the circle in Mark’s eyes was Straik. Straik made no effort to adapt himself to the ribald and realistic tone in which his colleagues spoke. He never drank nor smoked. He would sit silent, nursing a threadbare knee with a lean hand and turning his large unhappy eyes from one speaker to another, without attempting to combat them or to join in the joke when they laughed. Then — perhaps once in the whole evening — something said would start him off: usually something about the opposition of reactionaries in the outer world and the measures which the N.I.C.E. would take to deal with it. At such moments he would burst into loud and prolonged speech, threatening, denouncing, prophesying. The strange thing was that the others neither interrupted him nor laughed. There was some deeper unity between this uncouth man and them which apparently held in check the obvious lack of sympathy, but what it was Mark did not discover. Sometimes Straik addressed him in particular, talking, to Mark’s great discomfort and bewilderment, about resurrection. “Neither a historical fact nor a fable, young man,” he said, “but a prophecy. All the miracles — shadows of things to come. Get rid of false spirituality. It is all going to happen, here in this world, in the only world there is. What did the Master tell us? Heal the sick, cast out devils, raise the dead. We shall. The Son of Man — that is, Man himself, full grown — has power to judge the world — to distribute life without end, and punishment without end. You shall see. Here and now.” It was all very unpleasant. (128)
“It was not his fault,” she said at last. “I suppose our marriage was just a mistake.”
The Director said nothing.
“What would you — what would the people you are talking of — say about a case like that?”
“I will tell you if you really want to know,” said the Director.
“Please,” said Jane reluctantly.
“They would say,” he answered, “that you do not fail in obedience through lack of love, but have lost love because you never attempted obedience.”
Something in Jane that would normally have reacted to such a remark with anger or laughter was banished to a remote distance (where she could still, but only just, hear its voice) by the fact that the word Obedience — but certainly not obedience to Mark — came over her, in that room and in that presence, like a strange oriental perfume, perilous, seductive, and ambiguous…
“Stop it!” said the Director, sharply.
Jane stared at him, open mouthed. There were a few moments of silence during which the exotic fragrance faded away.
“You were saying, my dear?” resumed the Director.
“I thought love meant equality,” she said, “and free companionship.”
“Ah, equality!” said the Director. “We must talk of that some other time. Yes, we must all be guarded by equal rights from one another’s greed, because we are fallen. Just as we must all wear clothes for the same reason. But the naked body should be there underneath the clothes, ripening for the day when we shall need them no longer. Equality is not the deepest thing, you know.”
“I always thought that was just what it was. I thought it was in their souls that people were equal.”
“You were mistaken,” said he gravely. “That is the last place where they are equal. Equality before the law, equality of incomes — that is very well. Equality guards life; it doesn’t make it. It is medicine, not food. You might as well try to warm yourself with a blue-book.”
“But surely in marriage… ?”
“Worse and worse,” said the Director. “Courtship knows nothing of it; nor does fruition. What has free companionship to do with that? Those who are enjoying something, or suffering something together, are companions. Those who enjoy or suffer one another, are not. Do you not know how bashful friendship is? Friends — comrades — do not look at each other. Friendship would be ashamed…”
“I thought,” said Jane and stopped.
“I see,” said the Director. “It is not your fault. They never warned you. No one has ever told you that obedience — humility — is an erotic necessity. You are putting equality just where it ought not to be. As to your coming here, that may admit of some doubt. For the present, I must send you back. You can come out and see us. In the meantime, talk to your husband and I will talk to my authorities.” (147-148)
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No, no; we want geldings and oxen. There will never be peace and order and discipline so long as there is sex. When man has thrown it away, then he will become finally governable.
“At present, I allow, we must have forests, for the atmosphere. Presently we find a chemical substitute. And then, why any natural trees? I foresee nothing but the art tree all over the earth. In fact, we clean the planet.”
“Do you mean,” put in a man called Gould, “that we are to have no vegetation at all?”
“Exactly. You shave your face: even, in the English fashion, you shave him every day. One day we shave the planet.”
“I wonder what the birds will make of it?”
“I would not have any birds either. On the art tree I would have the art birds all singing when you press a switch inside the house. When you are tired of the singing you switch them off. Consider again the improvement. No feathers dropped about, no nests, no eggs, no dirt.”
“It sounds,” said Mark, “like abolishing pretty well all organic life.”
“And why not? It is simple hygiene. Listen, my friends. If you pick up some rotten thing and find this organic life crawling over it, do you not say, ‘Oh, the horrid thing. It is alive,’ and then drop it?”
“Go on,” said Winter.
“And you, especially you English, are you not hostile to any organic life except your own on your own body? Rather than permit it you have invented the daily bath.”
“That’s true.”
“And what do you call dirty dirt? Is it not precisely the organic? Minerals are clean dirt. But the real filth is what comes from organisms — sweat, spittles, excretions. Is not your whole idea of purity one huge example? The impure and the organic are interchangeable conceptions.”
“What are you driving at, Professor?” said Gould. “After all we are organisms ourselves.”
“I grant it. That is the point. In us organic life has produced Mind. It has done its work. After that we want no more of it. We do not want the world any longer furred over with organic life, like what you call the blue mould — all sprouting and budding and breeding and decaying. We must get rid of it. By little and little, of course. Slowly we learn how. Learn to make our brains live with less and less body: learn to build our bodies directly with chemicals, no longer have to stuff them full of dead brutes and weeds. Learn how to reproduce ourselves without copulation.”
“I don’t think that would be much fun,” said Winter.
“My friend, you have already separated the Fun, as you call it, from fertility. The Fun itself begins to pass away. Bah! I know that is not what you think. But look at your English women. Six out of ten are frigid, are they not? You see? Nature herself begins to throw away the anachronism. When she has thrown it away, then real civilisation becomes possible. You would understand if you were peasants. Who would try to work with stallions and bulls? No, no; we want geldings and oxen. There will never be peace and order and discipline so long as there is sex. When man has thrown it away, then he will become finally governable.” (172-173)
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“The world I look forward to is the world of perfect purity. The clean mind and the clean minerals. What are the things that most offend the dignity of man? Birth and breeding and death. How if we are about to discover that man can live without any of the three?” (174) Filostrato
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Nature is the ladder we have climbed up by, now we kick her away.
“For the moment, I speak only to inspire you. I speak that you may know what can be done: what shall be done here. This Institute — Dio mio, it is for something better than housing and vaccinations and faster trains and curing the people of cancer. It is for the conquest of death: or for the conquest of organic life, if you prefer. They are the same thing. It is to bring out of that cocoon of organic life which sheltered the babyhood of mind the New Man, the man who will not die, the artificial man, free from Nature. Nature is the ladder we have climbed up by, now we kick her away.” (177)
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Here, in this house, you shall meet the first sketch of the real God. It is a man — or a being made by man — who will finally ascend the throne of the universe. And rule forever.
“You are frightened?” said Filostrato. “You will get over that. We are offering to make you one of us. Ahi — if you were outside, if you were mere canaglia you would have reason to be frightened. It is the beginning of all power. He lives forever. The giant time is conquered. And the giant space — he was already conquered too. One of our company has already travelled in space. True; he was betrayed and murdered and his manuscripts are imperfect: we have not yet been able to reconstruct his space ship. But that will come.”
“It is the beginning of Man Immortal and Man Ubiquitous,” said Straik. “Man on the throne of the universe. It is what all the prophecies really meant.”
“At first, of course,” said Filostrato, “the power will be confined to a number — a small number — of individual men. Those who are selected for eternal life.”
“And you mean,” said Mark, “it will then be extended to all men?”
“No,” said Filostrato. “I mean it will then be reduced to one man. You are not a fool, are you, my young friend? All that talk about the power of Man over Nature — Man in the abstract — is only for the canaglia. You know as well as I do that Man’s power over Nature means the power of some men over other men with Nature as the instrument. There is no such thing as Man — it is a word. There are only men. No! It is not Man who will be omnipotent, it is some one man, some immortal man. Alcasan, our Head, is the first sketch of it. The completed product may be someone else. It may be you. It may be me.”
“A king cometh,” said Straik, “who shall rule the universe with righteousness and the heavens with judgment. You thought all that was mythology, no doubt. You thought because fables had clustered about the phrase, ‘Son of Man,’ that Man would never really have a son who will wield all power. But he will.”
“I don’t understand, I don’t understand,” said Mark.
“But it is very easy,” said Filostrato. “We have found how to make a dead man live. He was a wise man even in his natural life. He lives now forever; he gets wiser. Later, we make them live better — for at present, one must concede, this second life is probably not very agreeable to him who has it. You see? Later we make it pleasant for some — perhaps not so pleasant for others. For we can make the dead live whether they wish it or not. He who shall be finally king of the universe can give this life to whom he pleases. They cannot refuse the little present.”
“And so,” said Straik, “the lessons you learned at your mother’s knee return. God will have power to give eternal reward and eternal punishment.”
“God?” said Mark. “How does He come into it? I don’t believe in God.”
“But, my friend,” said Filostrato, “does it follow that because there was no God in the past that there will be no God also in the future?”
“Don’t you see,” said Straik, “that we are offering you the unspeakable glory of being present at the creation of God Almighty? Here, in this house, you shall meet the first sketch of the real God. It is a man — or a being made by man — who will finally ascend the throne of the universe. And rule forever.” (178-179)
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One of Ransom’s greatest difficulties in disputing with MacPhee (who consistently professed to disbelieve the very existence of the eldils) was that MacPhee made the common, but curious assumption that — if there are creatures wiser and stronger than man they must be forthwith omniscient and omnipotent. In vain did Ransom endeavour to explain the truth. Doubtless, the great beings who now so often came to him had power sufficient to sweep Belbury from the face of England and England from the face of the globe; perhaps, to blot the globe itself out of existence. But no power of that kind would be used. Nor had they any direct vision into the minds of men. It was in a different place, and approaching their knowledge from the other side, that they had discovered the state of Merlin: not from inspection of the thing that slept under Bragdon Wood, but from observing a certain unique configuration in that place where those things remain that are taken off thine’s mainroad, behind the invisible hedges, into the unimaginable fields. Not all the times that are outside the present are therefore past or future.
It was this that kept the Director wakeful, with knitted brow, in the small cold hours of that morning when the others had left him. There was no doubt in his mind now that the enemy had bought Bragdon to find Merlin: and if they found him they would re-awake him. The old Druid would inevitably cast his lot with the new planners — what could prevent his doing so? A junction would be effected between two kinds of power which between them would determine the fate of our planet. Doubtless that had been the will of the dark eldils for centuries. The physical sciences, good and innocent in themselves, had already, even in Ransom’s own time, begun to be warped, had been subtly manoeuvred in a certain direction. Despair of objective truth had been increasingly insinuated into the scientists; indifference to it, and a concentration upon mere power, had been the result. Babble about the élan vital and flirtations with panpsychism were bidding fair to restore the Anima Mundi of the magicians. Dreams of the far future destiny of man were dragging up from its shallow and unquiet grave the old dream of Man as God. The very experiences of the dissecting room and the pathological laboratory were breeding a conviction that the stilling of all deepset repugnances was the first essential for progress. And now, all this had reached the stage at which its dark contrivers thought they could safely begin to bend it back so that it would meet that other and earlier kind of power. Indeed they were choosing the first moment at which this could have been done. You could not have done it with Nineteenth-Century scientists. Their firm objective materialism would have excluded it from their minds; and even if they could have been made to believe, their inherited morality would have kept them from touching dirt. MacPhee was a survivor from that tradition. It was different now. Perhaps few or none of the people at Belbury knew what was happening; but once it happened, they would be like straw in fire. What should they find incredible, since they believed no longer in a rational universe? What should they regard as too obscene, since they held that all morality was a mere subjective by-product of the physical and economic situations of men?
“It is only 36 years from now. The streets, the buildings, the fields look just as they do today. And the people look the same – until you get close enough to see the bland, vacant stare in their eyes, to hear the empty, guarded quality of their voices.”
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“His faith was the faith of a Torquemada backed by science.”
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The imagination of the future comes in many guises.
Among the most compelling are five twentieth-century novels that, despite the marked differences in their literary styles, plot, and characters, are stunning examples of world-building. All are chillingly crisp depictions of totalitarianism built upon a foundation of technology and bureaucracy, and ultimately, sociological persuasion, manipulation, and control.
1984, by George Orwell Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley Fahrenheit 451 (based on The Fireman) by Ray Bradbury We, by Evgeniy Zamyatin Utopia 14 (alternate title Player Piano), by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
There are innumerable other works in this vein, particularly in the realm of science-fiction, which have received (or merited?!) far less attention, but which are still compelling in their own right. One of these is Kendell Foster Crossen’s 1954 Year of Consent which, despite not being of the same literary standard as the above-mentioned works, has proven to be eerily relevant to the United States, and perhaps “the world”, of 2021. A Dell paperback, you can read David Foster’s insightful 2021 review – I recommend it highly! – at ChicagoBoyz, and three brief comments (with middling ratings; oh, well!) at GoodReads.
To quote David Foster’s post:
The story is set in the then-future year of 1990. The United States is still nominally a democracy, but the real power lies with the social engineers…sophisticated advertising & PR men…who use psychological methods to persuade people that they really want what they are supposed to want. (Prefiguring “nudging”) The social engineers are aided in their tasks by a giant computer called Sociac (500,000 vacuum tubes! 860,000 relays!) and colloquially known as ‘Herbie.’ The political system now in place is called Democratic Rule by Consent. While the US still has a President, he is a figurehead and the administration of the country is actually done by the General Manager of the United States….who himself serves at the pleasure of the social engineers. The social engineers work in a department called ‘Communications’, which most people believe is limited to such benign tasks as keeping the telephones and the television stations in operation. Actually, its main function is the carrying out of influence operations.
…and…
Year of Consent can’t be called great literature, on a par with 1984 or Brave New World, but it projects a future which is perhaps closer to the immediate threats facing American liberty in 2020 than do either of those two other novels.
Aside from Crossen’s prescience, in purely artistic terms, Dell’s paperback is an unusual example of the art of illustrator Richard Powers. Unlike as in the overwhelming majority of his compositions, Powers created a painting that is both symbolic and realistic. In the background, kind of Matrix-like, a citizen is embedded in and connected to electronic circuits, her hands and feet fused into or hidden by a tapestry of wire junctions, even as her head and torso are surrounded by a translucent container.
However… Protagonist Gerald Leeds an his girlfriend Nancy are neither stylized nor abstract nor – as in so many of Powers’ 1950s paintings – diminutively symbolic: They’re depicted in complete and dramatic realism as they flee from “Herbie”.
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She and her smartphone are one!
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As far as the appearance of Gerald Leeds, could he have been modeled after Powers himself, as in this self-portrait from Bill & Sue-On Hillman’s ERBZine? (Just a thought.)
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SECURITY A.D. 1990
It is only 36 years from now. The streets, the buildings, the fields look just as they do today. And the people look the same – until you get close enough to see the bland, vacant stare in their eyes, to hear the empty, guarded quality of their voices.
They are victims of a gigantic con game. Free will, the right of dissent have been washed away in a sea of slogans coined by the public-relations manipulators who have taken over the government. The rare ones who momentarily forget they are no longer individuals have their symptoms recorded by an enormous mechanical brain in Washington. The real dissenters, the incorrigible rebels, have their “sickness” cured by a simple surgical operation…
This is the year of consent. And this is the story of a man who fought back.
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Some quotes from the novel.
Or, are they aspects of our reality?
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Never has there been more freedom anywhere than in America today.
We’ve done away with police and even prisons.
Crime has been almost wiped out since we recognized it as a social disease.
We’ve done away with poverty.
There are fewer restrictions on people than ever before in the history of mankind.
For the first time they’re really free.
Gerald reflects:
Even if it hadn’t been dangerous, I wouldn’t have argued with him.
He believed what he was saying.
His faith was the faith of a Torquemada backed by science.
There was no way to make him see
that the social engineers had taken away only one freedom,
but that it was the ultimate freedom –
the right to choose.
Everything…was decided for them and then they were conditioned to want it.
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“Why even the great Lenin said,
“It is true that liberty is precious – so precious that it must be rationed.”
“Yeah,” I said dryly. “Hobbyhorses.”
“What?”
“Hobbyhorses,” I repeated.
“Did you know that it is now almost two generations
since hobbyhorses have been sold in toy stores in either Russia or the United States?”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand,” he said doubtfully.
“I’m not sure why hobbyhorses withered away in the Soviet,” I said,
“but the ban was started here by the playschool consultants,
who were influenced by the social engineers
long before the latter came into power.
They put the finger on hobbyhorses
on the grounds that they did not develop the group spirit.”
He nodded thoughtfully.
“Of course.
But you realize that it meant different things in the two countries.
Here the group spirit was used to build fascism
while in Russia and the Soviet Countries it was used to build a people’s world.
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This is a fight to the finish between mass man and individual man.
It was a pretty even match until the advent of controlled mass communications.
Then the giant electronic brains completely tipped the scales…
there is no difference between our social engineers and those in Russia.
Both are out to turn the world into one of mass men –
everyone conforming in every single way.
And they’ve damn near succeeded.
“And as Paul said these things to himself, a wave of sadness washed over them as though they’d been written in sand. He was understanding now that no man could live without roots – roots in a patch of desert, a red clay field, a mountain slope, a rocky coast, a city street. In black loam, in mud or sand or rock or asphalt or carpet, every man had his roots down deep – his home.”
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Some works of fiction are didactic: An author will compose a short story; a novelette; a novel, to impart a lesson or present a viewpoint about the nature of contemporary society through the vantage of a “world”, whether that world be past, present, or future; whether that world be real or purely imaginary.
Other works of fiction can be emotionally cathartic: They create moods of anticipation, dread, and fear; they manufacture a sense of unreality – a perhaps Lovecraftian unreality, one permeated by an inexpressible sense of wrongness: “That which should not be, but is!” The goal? To cause aN intensity of feeling through identification with a character‘s (or, characters’) predicament, and then the resolution of that predicament: hopefully for the good. And if not for the good, at least – if there’s any compensation to be had – with stoicism and bravery.
And, then, some works of fiction can be prophetic. Whether written a thousand, a hundred, or ten years “prior”; whether through chance; whether by calculatedly analyzing economic, ideological, sociological, and technological trends; whether by intuition born of a sixth sense, or, intuition born from the ability to view the “world” from a vantage point detached from popular culture and the mood of an age; whether ultimately by grasping (to adapt the idiom of Charles Péguy) the “mystique” of an age, some works of fiction can be – and are – windows upon the future.
The prediction doesn’t have to be accurate – how could it be? – close enough will duly suffice.
Case in point, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s 1952 novel (his first novel, at that) Player Piano, excerpts from which follow, quoted from Dell’s 1980 edition.
Not as well known as his subsequent works, such as The Sirens of Titan or Slaughterhouse-Five (the latter having been adapted for film), the novel – especially in the year 2021 – merits consideration for Vonnegut’s degree of foresight, if not prescience, via his extrapolation of academic, sociological, and technological trends then prevalent in post WW-II America.
And today, irrevocably prevailing?
While an in-depth description of Player Piano is beyond the immediate scope of this post (such insight is readily available at Wikipedia and GoodReads), and it has been a “few” (!) decades since I’ve read the novel), here’s a mini(mini), highly simplified summary of the work: Vonnegut posits a scenario where in the United States, through a combination of advances in electronic technology, and, the development of a permanent academic, corporate, and government meritocracy, society has arrived at a great stagnation: A small minority (a very small minority) of corporate bureaucrats and electronic engineers has become responsible for the operation and maintenance of the technology that, in effect and reality, runs not just the United States, but the modern world.
On a technical note, the word “tapes” appears in the text when Vonnegut alludes to the technology and algorithms that run society, probably reflective of the use of magnetic tape as a medium for data storage in the 1950s. (Well, this was before the advent of the transistor, let alone integrated circuits.)
As touched upon at several points in the novel, the only real activity for many citizens has become “employment” with the Reconstruction and Reclamation Corps – the “Reeks and Wrecks” – or enrollment in the Army, the latter having no battles to fight. However, rather than the violence, rebellion, or “underground” one might expect to arise in such a situation, the mood and actions of the citizenry are instead characterized by the opposite: Except for the ruling elite, society is permeated by pervasive lethargy born of resignation: a spiritual, psychological, and intellectual malaise which has vague undertones (no overtones!) of a crudely Huxleyan – not Orwellian – world (by no means a Brave world, either). The material and physical needs of most of citizens are provided for on a nominal level, but humanity has become permanently “stuck”.
Enter Doctor Paul Proteus. (Great choice of character name by Vonnegut!) One of the “engineers”, the 35-year-old Dr. Proteus becomes disillusioned with and alienated from his place and role in society, and becomes involved in an attempt to … well … change things. Drastically. Permanently. For the better. However (spoiler alert!), despite his best efforts and the mood of optimism and hope that pervades the novel’s latter pages (you really, really think that success will ensue), Player Piano ends upon a solidly, matter-of-factly, pessimistic note: The organization of society, the pervasiveness and power of electronic technology, the reluctant or willing (and sometimes both) co-option of the intellectual elite by government and corporate (especially corporate) bureaucracy, and the habituation of the population to a gray nature, all combine to generate a civilizational momentum that has irrevocably solidified the structure of society.
Change, if any, will only come in a way yet unknown.
One recompense, though a recompense in a sense purely literary, is Player Piano’s very quality as literature. It’s well written. Very well written, at a level that renders its dystopian ending, well … uh … tolerable. In any event, not only is there no easy way out, there seems to be no way “out”, at all. And in that sense, another recompense, albeit of a symbolic nature, is that the novel’s ending is realistic and refreshingly non-Spielbergian, characterized by neither an avoidance of reality nor a romanticized view of human nature.
Examples of cover art for three editions of the book follow below, with quotes interspersed between.
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Don’t you see, Doctor?” said Lasher. “The machines are to practically everybody what the white men were to the Indians. People are finding that, because of the way the machines are changing the world, more and more of their old values don’t apply any more. People have no choice but to become second-rate-machines themselves, or wards of the machines.”
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(Here’s the cover of the novel’s first (1952) printing; artist unknown. Note that the cover shows symbols of science and technology: An oscilloscope, a diagram of a circuit, and a “man”. Notably, the man – whether Scribner’s design staff intended so is unknown! – is dwarfed by technology.)
Paul nodded his thanks. His skin began to itch, as though he had suddenly become unclean. These were members of the Reconstruction and Reclamation Corps, in their own estimate the “Reeks and Wrecks”. Those who couldn’t compete economically with machines had their choice, if they had no source of income, of the Army or the Reconstruction and Reclamation Corps. The soldiers, with their hollowness hidden beneath twinkling buttons and buckles, crisp serge, and glossy leather, didn’t depress Paul nearly as much as the Reeks and Wrecks did. (21-22)
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At one point, Kroner raised his big hand and asked if he might make a comment. “Just to sort of underline what you’re saying, Paul, I’d like to point out something I thought was rather interesting. One horsepower equals about twenty-two manpower – big manpower. If you convert the horsepower of one of the bigger steel-mill motors into terms of manpower, you’ll find that the motor does more work than the entire slave population of the United States at the time of the Civil War could do – and do it twenty-four hours a day.” He smiled beatifically. Kroner was the rock, the fountainhead of faith and pride for all in the Eastern Division. (45)
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Kroner smiled, “As you say, like rabbits. Incidentally, Paul, another interesting sidelight your father probably told you about is how people didn’t pay much attention to this, as you call it, Second Industrial Revolution for quite some time. Atomic energy was hogging the headlines, and everybody talked as though peacetime uses of atomic energy were going to remake the world. The Atomic Age, that was the big thing to look forward to. Remember, Baer? And meanwhile, the tubes increased like rabbits.” (46-47)
(…and, rear cover.)
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“Uh-huh,” said Paul, looking at the familiar graph with distaste. It was a so-called Achievement and Aptitude Profile, and every college graduate got one along with his sheepskin. And the sheepskin was nothing, and the graph was everything. When time for graduation came, a machine took a student’s grades and other performances and integrated them into one graph – the profile. Here Bud’s graph was high for theory, there low for administration, here low for creativity, and so on, up and down across the page to the last quality – personality. In mysterious, unnamed units of measure, each graduate was credited with having a high, medium, or low personality. Bud, Paul saw, was a strong medium, as the expression went, personality-wise. When the graduate was taken into the economy, all his peaks and valleys were translated into perforations on his personal card. (65)
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“That’s pretty strong. I will say you’ve shown up what thin stuff clergymen were peddling, most of them. When I had a congregation before the war, I used to tell them that the life of their spirit in relation to God was the biggest thing in their lives, and that their part in the economy was nothing by comparison. Now, you people have engineered them out of their part in the economy, in the market place, and they’re finding out – most of them – that what’s left is just another zero. A good bit of enough, anyway.
My glass is empty.”
Lasher sighed. “What do you expect?” he said. “For generations they’ve been built up to worship competition and the market, productivity and economic usefulness, and the envy of their fellow men – and boom! it’s all yanked out from under them. They can’t participate, can’t be useful any more. Their whole culture’s had been shot to hell.
My glass is empty.”
“I just had it filled again,” said Finnerty. “Oh, so you did.” Lasher sipped thoughtfully.
“These displaced people need something, and the clergy can’t give it to them – or it’s impossible for them to take what the clergy offers. The clergy says it’s enough, and so does the Bible. The people say it isn’t enough, and I suppose they’re right.”
“If they were so fond of the old system, how come they were so cantankerous about their jobs when they had them?” said Paul.
“Oh, this business we’ve got now – it’s been going on for a long time now, not just since the last war. Maybe the actual jobs weren’t being taken from the people, but the sense of participation, the sense of importance was. Go to the library sometime, and take a look at the magazines and newspapers clear back as far as World War II. Even then there was a lot of talk about know-how winning the war of production – know-how, not people, not the mediocre people running most of the machines. And the hell of it was that it was pretty much true. 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. And then there was all this let’s-not-shoot-Father Christmas advertising.”
“How that?” said Paul.
“You know – those ads about the American system, meaning managers and engineers, that made America great. When you finished one, you’d think the managers and engineers had given America everything: forests, rivers, minerals, mountains, oil – the works.”
“Strange business,” said Lasher. “This crusading spirit of the managers and engineers, the idea of designing and manufacturing and distributing being sort of a holy way: all that folklore was cooked up by public relations and advertising men hired by managers and engineers to make big business popular in the old days, which it certainly wasn’t in the beginning. Now, the engineers and managers believe with all their hearts the glorious things their forebears hired people to say about them. Yesterday’s snow job business becomes today’s sermon.” (78-79)
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And the personnel machines saw to it that all governmental jobs of any consequence were filled by top-notch civil servants. The more Halyard thought about Lynn’s fat pay check, the madder he got, because all the gorgeous dummy had to do was read whatever was handed to him on state occasions: to be suitable awed and reverent, as he said, for all the ordinary, stupid people who’d elected him to office, to run wisdom from somewhere else through that resonant voicebox and between those even, pearl choppers. (104)
(The novel’s first paperback edition (November, 1954) published by Bantam Books under the titleUtopia 14, with cover art by Charles Binger. The cover scene is so general as to be unrelated to any specific event in the novel. On one side and receding into the distance, an ambiguous mass of struggling humanity, with no individual distinct from another. On the other, a man stares forward contemplatively; indifferently. The backdrop? Towers, buildings, platforms, and perhaps a factory: A vague metropolis against a sunset.)
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“Um,” said Mr. Haycox apathetically. “What [sic] do you keep working so smoothly?” Doctor Paul smiled modestly. “I spent seven years in the Cornell Graduate School of Realty to qualify for a Doctor of Realty degree and get this job.” “Call yourself a doctor, too, do you?” said Mr. Haycox. “I think I can say without fear of contradiction that I earned that degree,” said Doctor Paul coolly. “My thesis was the third longest in any field in the country that year – eight hundred and ninety-six pages, double-spaced, with narrow margins.” “Real-estate salesman,” said Mr. Haycox. 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, chickenshit,” he said. “When you doctors figure out what you want, you’ll find me in the barn shoveling my thesis.” (133-134)
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He tried again: “In order to get what we’ve got, Anita, we have, in effect, traded these people out of what was the most important thing on earth to them – the feeling of being needed and useful, the foundation of self-respect.” (151)
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“That’s just it: things haven’t always been that way. It’s new, and it’s people like us who’ve brought it about. Hell, everybody used to have some personal skill or willingness to work or something he could trade for what he wanted. Now that the machines have taken over, it’s quite somebody who has anything to offer. All most people can do is hope to be given something.” (159)
(And, the rather simple rear cover.)
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“But he was great, and nobody’d argue about that, but do you think he could have been great today, in this modern day and age? Wheeler? Elm Wheeler? You know what he would be today? A Reek and a Wreck, that’s all. The war made him, and this life would of killed him.”
“Used to be there was a lot of damn fool things a dumb bastard could do to be great, but the machines fixed that. You know, used to be you could go to sea or a big clipper ship or a fishing ship and be a big hero in a storm. Or maybe you could be a pioneer and go out west and lead the people and make trails and chase away Indians and all that. Or you could be a cowboy, or all kinds of dangerous things, and still, be a dumb bastard.
“Now the machines take all the dangerous jobs, and the dumb bastards get tucked away in big bunches of prefabs that look like the end of a game of Monopoly, or in barracks, and there’s nothing for them to do but set there and kind of hope for a big fire where maybe they can run into a burning building in front of everybody and run out with a baby in their hands. Or maybe hope – though they don’t say so out loud because the last one was so terrible – for another war. Course, there isn’t going to be another one.
“And, oh, I guess machines have made things a lot better. I’d be a fool to say they haven’t, though there’s been plenty who say they haven’t, and I can see what they mean, all right. It does seem like the machines took all the good jobs, where a man could be true to himself and false to nobody else, and left all the silly ones. And I guess I’m just about the end of a race, standing here on my own two feet.” (178-179)
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“Paul, your father tells me you’re real smart.” Paul had nodded uncomfortably. “That’s good, Paul, but that’s not enough.”
“No, sir.”
“Don’t be bluffed.”
“No, sir, I won’t.”
“Everybody’s shaking in their boots, so don’t be bluffed.”
“No, sir.”
“Nobody’s so damn well educated that you can’t learn ninety per-cent of what he knows in six weeks. The other ten per cent is decoration.”
“Yes, sir.”
“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.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Almost nobody’s competent, Paul. It’s enough to make you cry to see how had most people are at their jobs. If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you’re a one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Want to be rich, Paul?”
“Yes, sir – I guess so. Yes, sir.”
“All right. I got rich, and I told you ninety per cent of what I know about it. The rest is decoration. All right?” (198)
(One of the several paperback editions published by Dell, this copy is a 1980 imprint. Hard to tell if the cover design is a painting, or, a sculpture or casting; I think the latter. Faces – similar faces – embedded in clear acrylic or glass. Looks like a human pinball machine, where the pinballs are frozen in space.)
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And as Paul said these things to himself, a wave of sadness washed over them as though they’d been written in sand. He was understanding now that no man could live without roots – roots in a patch of desert, a red clay field, a mountain slope, a rocky coast, a city street. In black loam, in mud or sand or rock or asphalt or carpet, every man had his roots down deep – his home. A lump grew in his throat, and he couldn’t do anything about it. Doctor Paul Proteus was saying goodbye forever. (205)
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“Public relations,” said Halyard. “Please, what are public relations?” said Khashdrahr. “That profession,” said Halyard, quoting by memory from the Manual, “that profession specializing in the cultivation, by applied psychology in mass communication media, of favorable public opinion with regard to controversial issues and institutions, without being offensive to anyone of importance, and with the continued stability of the economy and society its primary goal.” (209)
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“… He watched his brother find peace of mind through psychiatry. That’s why he won’t have anything to do with it.” “I don’t follow. Isn’t his brother happy?” “Utterly and always happy. 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. That was the trouble with his book. It raised those questions, and, was rejected. So he was ordered into public-relations duty.” (212)
(And, rear cover.)
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Don’t you see, Doctor?” said Lasher. “The machines are to practically everybody what the white men were to the Indians. People are finding that, because of the way the machines are changing the world, more and more of their old values don’t apply any more. People have no choice but to become second-rate-machines themselves, or wards of the machines.” (251)
“Whether we entrust our decisions to machines of metal, or to those machines of flesh and blood which are bureaus and vast laboratories and armies and corporations, we shall never receive the right answers to our questions unless we ask the right questions.” – Norbert Wiener
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In the summer of 2020, I read a book.
Actually, in 2020 I read several books, and I’m reading a book right now, in 2021: Judgement Night, by Catherine L. Moore. But of last year’s reading, two works – read back to back – have particularly stood out for me: S. Ansky’s (pen name of Shloyme Zanvl Rappoport) The Enemy At His Pleasure, and, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.
A central theme of both – viewed from a very distant literary vantage point! – is the sudden and unanticipated transformation of a culture, society, and nation through the development and impact of forces within and without. While in practically ever significant respect the books are vastly dissimilar (not even considering the central fact that Ansky’s is non-fiction and Bradbury’s not) a commonality of their writings is the reaction of people – people as individuals; people collectively – to overwhelming, unexpected, and traumatic social change.
In retrospect, coincidentally or not, how very strange that having read in The Enemy At His Pleasure in April, I finished Bradbury’s novel on a Friday in the latter part of May: While seated in a quiet, shaded garden adjacent to a public library in a (for the time being…) peaceful suburb (was it only a few brief months ago that public libraries maintained full operating hours?) – considering the events would soon follow in the United States, and even beyond in the still-atrophying “West”, shortly thereafter.
Regardless of how the events of 2020 are viewed “now”, I think that future historians – that is, assuming history even survives as an intellectual discipline in the future – will come to understand the events of the past year (primarily in the United States, and secondarily in parts of Western Europe) as having been a kind of antinomian religious frenzy. This strikingly parallels the millenarian social unrest that persisted in central and western Europe from the eleventh through the sixteenth centuries. But, rather than ostensible (and really, superficial) concerns about “social justice”, the events of 2020 were at heart a reflection of obsessions about the potential loss of social status by a secular (and comfortably insular in that secularity), credentialed, technocratic, entitled, and ultimately quite venal elite.
Or more accurately, “elite”.
Oh, back to the novel at hand…
And while the power and depth of Bradbury’s novel were well forceful enough on their own in literary, emotional, and intellectual terms, the intersection of these qualities with the impact of events in “outside world” – the “real” world – only intensified the validity and force of the book’s message. Or, messages, of which there were several.
And so… This also gave me an appreciation for the quality of Ray Bradbury’s writing, for despite having long been a devotee of science fiction (specifically that of Cordwainer Smith and A.E. van Vogt and Philip K. Dick and Catherine L. Moore and Cyril Kornbluth and Dan Simmons and Poul Anderson; Isaac Asimov not so much and really not at all), this was actually the first time I’d read any of Bradbury’s novels. (Well, I guess people change.) The very antithesis of a “hard SF” writer – though technological conjecture and extrapolation are nonetheless central to his stories – I found that Bradbury excelled in the description of emotion and thought; actions and event; communication and conflict, with a richness of language born of an uncanny (well, sometimes overdone, but it works) use of metaphor and similie.
And, so… In much that same way that my posts combine scans a book or magazine’s cover (and frequently interior) art with excerpts from those publications, this post revisits my earlier post about Fahrenheit 451, which displays the cover art of the book’s first American paperback edition, by displaying the cover of the book’s Del Rey / Ballantine Book edition of April, 1991. As you can see, the central component of Joseph Mugnaini’s art – a “Fireman”, whose fireproof suit is actually made from the torn newspaper pages is wreathed in flames – has been retained from the 1953 edition, but otherwise, the cover is simplified: The Fireman appears in black & white, and there is no background. That’s all there is. For reasons of literary and cultural familiarity, I suppose this was enough.
And… In much the same way that some of my posts – at least, those for the genre of science fiction! – include images of both a book’s cover, and, the cover art of the magazine in which said book was first serialized, this post features images of Fahrenheit 451’s first appearance: The February, 1951, issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. Bradbury’s novel, illustrated by Karl Rogers, occupies half the magazine’s length (pages 4 through 61), the other stories being “…And It Comes Out Here” by Lester Del Rey, “The Protector” by Betsy Curtis, “Second Childhood” by Clifford D. Simak, “Two Weeks in August” by Frank M. Robinson, and the second installment of Isaac Asimov’s “Tyrann”.
And… This is an instance most interesting and not uncommon, where the magazine’s cover art has absolutely no relation to the stories within. Entitled “The Tying Down of a Spaceship on Mars in a Desert Sandstorm,” the time-frame (early 50s) subject matter and vivid softness of the colors make the painting easily recognizable as a work of Chesley Bonestell,
And yet… Even as I read Fahrenheit 451, I couldn’t help but notice the way that the world constructed by Ray Bradbury – either through prescience, chance, or an uncanny combination of both – has captured our world: The world of the recent past; the world that exists now, in 2020; the world that seems to await us, even as this second decade of the twenty-first century is shortly drawing to a close. So, I’m presenting excerpts of some (hard to chose!) of the novel’s most crisply and vividly crafted passages, juxtaposed with contemporary symbols that most uncannily match and embody the events, scenes, and characters depicted in these very passages.
Among these excerpts are some videos and book over art that reflect the mood and message of Fahrenheit 451.
The post closes with by Yann Tiersen’s melody “Comptine d’un autre été – “Rhyme for Another Summer”, from the sound-track for trailer of 2001’s Amélie, at Rousseau’s YouTube channel. I chose this because it’s the background theme for the short video, “This Is Our World – I Am Speechless“, in the “middle” of this post.
I wish that Ray Bradbury were with us now, to “illustrate” (pardon the pun!) by words the world we now inhabit. But, he is not. He died in 2012, only eight years by the measure of time, but another world by the measure of technology.
“We have a good deal of experience as to how the industrialists regard a new industrial potential. Their whole propaganda is to the effect that it must not be considered as the business of the government but must be left open to whatever entrepreneurs wish to invest money in it.”
In the myths and fairy tales that we read as children we learned a few of the simpler and more obvious truths of life, such as that when a djinnee is found in a bottle, it had better be left there; that the fisherman who craves a boon from heaven too many times on behalf of his wife will end up exactly where he started; that if you are given three wishes, you must be very careful what you wish for. These simple and obvious truths represent the childish equivalent of the tragic view of life which the Greeks and many modern Europeans possess, and which is somehow missing in this land of plenty.
“Whether we entrust our decisions to machines of metal, or to those machines of flesh and blood which are bureaus and vast laboratories and armies and corporations, we shall never receive the right answers to our questions unless we ask the right questions.”
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We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against. So! A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man’s mind. Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man?
It didn’t come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God. Today, thanks to them, you can stay happy all the time…
For another of those impossible instants the city stood, rebuilt and unrecognizable, taller than it had ever hoped or strived to be, taller than man had built it, erected at last in gouts of shattered concrete and sparkles of torn metal into a mural hung like a reversed avalanche, a million colors, a million oddities, a door where a window should be, a top for a bottom, a side for a back, and then the city rolled over and fell down dead.
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His wife said, “What are you doing?”
He balanced in space with the book in his sweating cold fingers.
A minute later she said, “Well, just don’t stand there in the middle of the floor.”
He made a small sound.
“What?” she asked.
He made more soft sounds. He stumbled towards the bed and shoved the book clumsily under the cold pillow. He fell into bed and his wife cried out, startled. He lay far across the room from her, on a winter island separated by an empty sea. She talked to him for what seemed a long while and she talked about this and she talked about that and it was only words, like the words he had heard once in a nursery at a friend’s house, a two-year-old child building word patterns, talking jargon, making pretty sounds in the air. But Montag said nothing and after a long while when he only made the small sounds, he felt her move in the room and come to his bed and stand over him and put her hand down to feel his cheek. He knew that when she pulled her hand away from his face it was wet. (41)
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And he remembered thinking then that if she died, he was certain he wouldn’t cry. For it would be the dying of an unknown, a street face, a newspaper image, and it was suddenly so very wrong that he had begun to cry, not at death but at the thought of not crying at death, a silly empty man near a silly empty woman, while the hungry snake made her still more empty. (44)
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A great thunderstorm of sound gushed from the walls. Music bombarded him at such an immense volume that his bones were almost shaken from their tendons; he felt his jaw vibrate, his eyes wobble in his head. He was a victim of concussion. When it was all over he felt like a man who had been thrown from a cliff, whirled in a centrifuge and spat out over a waterfall that fell and fell into emptiness and emptiness and never-quite-touched-bottom-never-never-quite-no not quite-touched-bottom … and you fell so fast you didn’t touch the sides either … never … quite … touched … anything.
The thunder faded. The music died.
“There,” said Mildred,
And it was indeed remarkable. Something had happened. Even though the people in the walls of the room had barely moved, and nothing had really been settled, you had the impression that someone had turned on a washing-machine or sucked you up in a gigantic vacuum. You drowned in music and pure cacophony. He came out of the room sweating and on the point of collapse. Behind him, Mildred sat in her chair and the voices went on again: (45)
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He had chills and fever in the morning.
“You can’t be sick,” said Mildred.
He closed his eyes over the hotness. “Yes.”
“But you were all right last night.”
“No, I wasn’t all right.” He heard the “relatives” shouting in the parlor.
Mildred stood over his bed, curiously. He felt her there, he saw her without opening his eyes, her hair burnt by chemicals to a brittle straw, her eyes with a kind of cataract unseen but suspect far behind the pupils, the reddened pouting lips, the body as thin as a praying mantis from dieting, and her flesh like white bacon. He could remember her no other way. (48)
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“No, not water; fire. You ever seen a burned house? It smoulders for days. Well, this fire’ll last me the rest of my life. God! I’ve been trying to put it out, in my mind, all night. I’m crazy with trying.”
“You should have thought of that before becoming a fireman.”
“Thought!” he said. “Was I given a choice? My grandfather and father were firemen. In my sleep, I ran after them.”
The parlor was playing a dance tune.
“This is the day you go on the early shift,” said Mildred. “You should have gone two hours ago. I just noticed.”
“It’s not just the woman that died,” said Montag. “Last night I thought about all the kerosene I’ve used in the past ten years. And I thought about books. And for the first time I realized that a man was behind each one of the books. A man had to think them up. A man had to take a long time to put them down on paper. And I’d never even thought that thought before.” He got out of bed. (51)
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And then he shut up, for he remembered last week and the two white stones staring up at the ceiling and the pump-snake with the probing eye and the two soap-faced men with the cigarettes moving in their mouths when they talked. But that was another Mildred, that was a Mildred so deep inside this one, and so bothered, really bothered, that the two women had never met. He turned away. (52)
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“Speed up the film, Montag, quick. Click,
Pic,
Look,
Eye,
Now,
Flick,
Here,
There,
Swift,
Pace,
Up,
Down,
In,
Out,
Why,
How,
Who,
What,
Where, Eh?
Uh!
Bang!
Smack!
Wallop, Bing, Bong, Boom! Digest-digests, digest-digest-digests. Politics? One column, two sentences, a headline! Then, in mid-air, all vanishes! Whirl man’s mind around about so fast under the pumping hands of publishers, exploiters, broadcasters, that the centrifuge flings off all unnecessary, time-wasting thought!” (55)
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“There you have it, Montag. It didn’t come from the Government down.
There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no!
Technology, mass exploitation,
and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God.
Today, thanks to them,
you can stay happy all the time, you are allowed to read comics, the good old confessions, or trade journals.”
“Yes, but what about the firemen, then?” asked Montag.
“Ah.” Beatty leaned forward in the faint mist of smoke from his pipe. “What more easily explained and natural? With school turning out more runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, snatchers, fliers, and swimmers instead of examiners, critics, knowers, and imaginative creators, the word `intellectual,’ of course, became the swear word it deserved to be. You always dread the unfamiliar. Surely you remember the boy in your own school class who was exceptionally ‘bright,’ did most of the reciting and answering while the others sat like so many leaden idols, hating him. And wasn’t it this bright boy you selected for beatings and tortures after hours? Of course it was. We must all be alike.
Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says,
but everyone made equal.
Each man the image of every other;
then all are happy,
for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against.
So!
A book is a loaded gun in the house next door.
Burn it.
Take the shot from the weapon.
Breach man’s mind.
Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man? Me? I won’t stomach them for a minute. And so when houses were finally fireproofed completely, all over the world (you were correct in your assumption the other night) there was no longer need of firemen for the old purposes. They were given the new job, as custodians of our peace of mind, the focus of our understandable and rightful dread of being inferior; official censors, judges, and executors. That’s you, Montag, and that’s me.” (58)
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(Art by Ed Lindlof, for cover of Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death – Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, 1986 Penguin Edition)
Peace, Montag. Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of ‘facts’ they feel stuffed, but absolutely `brilliant’ with information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving. And they’ll be happy, because facts of that sort don’t change. Don’t give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy. Any man who can take a TV wall apart and put it back together again, and most men can nowadays, is happier than any man who tries to slide-rule, measure, and equate the universe, which just won’t be measured or equated without making man feel bestial and lonely. I know, I’ve tried it; to hell with it. So bring on your clubs and parties, your acrobats and magicians, your dare-devils, jet cars, motorcycle helicopters, your sex and heroin, more of everything to do with automatic reflex. If the drama is bad, if the film says nothing, if the play is hollow, sting me with the theremin, loudly. I’ll think I’m responding to the play, when it’s only a tactile reaction to vibration. But I don’t care. I just like solid entertainment.” (61)
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“This Is Our World – I Am Speechless” (creator unknown)
“THESE SYSTEMS ARE FAILING”
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Across the street and down the way the other houses stood with their flat fronts. What was it Clarisse had said one afternoon? “No front porches. My uncle says there used to be front porches. And people sat there sometimes at night, talking when they wanted to talk, rocking, and not talking when they didn’t want to talk. Sometimes they just sat there and thought about things, turned things over. My uncle says the architects got rid of the front porches because they didn’t look well. But my uncle says that was merely rationalizing it; the real reason, hidden underneath, might be they didn’t want people sitting like that, doing nothing, rocking, talking; that was the wrong kind of social life. People talked too much. And they had time to think. So they ran off with the porches. And the gardens, too. Not many gardens any more to sit around in. And look at the furniture. No rocking chairs any more. They’re too comfortable. Get people up and running around. My uncle says … and … my uncle … and … my uncle …” Her voice faded. (63)
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The bombers crossed the sky and crossed the sky over the house, gasping, murmuring, whistling like an immense, invisible fan, circling in emptiness.
“Jesus God,” said Montag. “Every hour so many damn things in the sky! How in hell did those bombers get up there every single second of our lives! Why doesn’t someone want to talk about it? We’ve started and won two atomic wars since 1960. Is it because we’re having so much fun at home we’ve forgotten the world? Is it because we’re so rich and the rest of the world’s so poor and we just don’t care if they are? I’ve heard rumors; the world is starving, but we’re well fed. Is it true, the world works hard and we play? Is that why we’re hated so much? I’ve heard the rumors about hate, too, once in a long while, over the years. Do you know why? I don’t, that’s sure! Maybe the books can get us half out of the cave. They just might stop us from making the same damn insane mistakes! I don’t hear those idiot bastards in your parlor talking about it. God, Millie, don’t you see? An hour a day, two hours, with these books, and maybe…” (73)
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He could hear Beatty’s voice. “Sit down, Montag. Watch. Delicately, like the petals of a flower. Light the first page, light the second page. Each becomes a black butterfly. Beautiful, eh? Light the third page from the second and so on, chain smoking, chapter by chapter, all the silly things the words mean, all the false promises, all the second-hand notions and time-worn philosophies.” There sat Beatty, perspiring gently, the floor littered with swarms of black moths that had died in a single storm. (75-76)
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The people who had been sitting a moment before, tapping their feet to the rhythm of Denham’s Dentifrice, Denham’s Dandy Dental Detergent, Denham’s Dentifrice Dentifrice Dentifrice, one two, one two three, one two, one two three. The people whose mouths had been faintly twitching the words Dentifrice Dentifrice Dentifrice. The train radio vomited upon Montag, in retaliation, a great ton-load of music made of tin, copper, silver, chromium, and brass. The people were pounded into submission; they did not run, there was no place to run; the great air-train fell down its shaft in the earth. (79)
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“It looks like a Seashell radio.”
“And something more! It listens! If you put it in your ear, Montag, I can sit comfortably home, warming my frightened bones, and hear and analyze the firemen’s world, find its weaknesses, without danger. I’m the Queen Bee, safe in the hive. You will be the drone, the travelling ear. Eventually, I could put out ears into all parts of the city, with various men, listening and evaluating. If the drones die, I’m still safe at home, tending my fright with a maximum of comfort and a minimum of chance. See how safe I play it, how contemptible I am?” (90)
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They were like a monstrous crystal chandelier tinkling in a thousand chimes, he saw their Cheshire Cat smiles burning through the walls of the house, and now they were screaming at each other above the din. Montag found himself at the parlor door with his food still in his mouth. (93)
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Montag said nothing but stood looking at the women’s faces as he had once looked at the faces of saints in a strange church he had entered when he was a child. The faces of those enameled creatures meant nothing to him, though he talked to them and stood in that church for a long time, trying to be of that religion, trying to know what that religion was, trying to get enough of the raw incense and special dust of the place into his lungs and thus into his blood to feel touched and concerned by the meaning of the colorful men and women with the porcelain eyes and the blood-ruby lips. But there was nothing, nothing; it was a stroll through another store, and his currency strange and unusable there, and his passion cold, even when he touched the wood and plaster and clay. So it was now, in his own parlor, with these women twisting in their chairs under his gaze, lighting cigarettes, blowing smoke, touching their sun-fired hair and examining their blazing fingernails as if they had caught fire from his look. Their faces grew haunted with silence. They leaned forward at the sound of Montag’s swallowing his final bite of food. They listened to his feverish breathing. The three empty walls of the room were like the pale brows of sleeping giants now, empty of dreams. Montag felt that if you touched these three staring brows you would feel a fine salt sweat on your finger-tips. The perspiration gathered with the silence and the sub-audible trembling around and about and in the women who were burning with tension. Any moment they might hiss a long sputtering hiss and explode. (95)
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The room was blazing hot, he was all fire, he was all coldness; they sat in the middle of an empty desert with three chairs and him standing, swaying, and him waiting for Mrs. Phelps to stop straightening her dress hem and Mrs. Bowles to take her fingers away from her hair. Then he began to read in a low, stumbling voice that grew firmer as he progressed from line to line, and his voice went out across the desert, into the whiteness, and around the three sitting women there in the great hot emptiness: (99)
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His fingers were like ferrets that had done some evil and now never rested, always stirred and picked and hid in pockets, moving from under Beatty’s alcohol-flame stare. If Beatty so much as breathed on them, Montag felt that his hands might wither, turn over on their sides, and never be shocked to life again; they would be buried the rest of his life in his coat-sleeves, forgotten. For these were the hands that had acted on their own, no part of him, here was where the conscience first manifested itself to snatch books, dart off with job and Ruth and Willie Shakespeare, and now, in the firehouse, these hands seemed gloved with blood. (105)
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There was a crash like the falling parts of a dream fashioned out of warped glass, mirrors, and crystal prisms. Montag drifted about as if still another incomprehensible storm had turned him, to see Stoneman and Black wielding axes, shattering window-panes to provide cross-ventilation. (114)
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Nowhere. There was nowhere to go, no friend to turn to, really. Except Faber. And then he realized that he was indeed, running toward Faber’s house, instinctively. But Faber couldn’t hide him; it would be suicide even to try. But he knew that he would go to see Faber anyway, for a few short minutes. Faber’s would be the place where he might refuel his fast draining belief in his own ability to survive. He just wanted to know that there was a man like Faber in the world. He wanted to see the man alive and not burned back there like a body shelled in another body. And some of the money must be left with Faber, of course, to be spent after Montag ran on his way. Perhaps he could make the open country and live on or near the rivers and near the highways, in the fields and hills.
A great whirling whisper made him look to the sky.
The police helicopters were rising so far away that it seemed someone had blown the grey head off a dry dandelion flower. Two dozen of them flurried, wavering, indecisive, three miles off, like butterflies puzzled by autumn, and then they were plummeting down to land, one by one, here, there, softly kneading the streets where, turned back to beetles, they shrieked along the boulevards or, as suddenly, leapt back into the sir, continuing their search. (125)
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There it lay, a game for him to win, a vast bowling alley in the cool morning. The boulevard was as clean as the surface of an arena two minutes before the appearance of certain unnamed victims and certain unknown killers. The air over and above the vast concrete river trembled with the warmth of Montag’s body alone; it was incredible how he felt his temperature could cause the whole immediate world to vibrate. He was a phosphorescent target; he knew it, he felt it. And now he must begin his little walk. (126)
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He was three hundred yards downstream when the Hound reached the river. Overhead the great racketing fans of the helicopters hovered. A storm of light fell upon the river and Montag dived under the great illumination as if the sun had broken the clouds. He felt the river pull him further on its way, into darkness. Then the lights switched back to the land, the helicopters swerved over the city again, as if they had picked up another trail. They were gone. The Hound was gone. Now there was only the cold river and Montag floating in a sudden peacefulness, away from the city and the lights and the chase, away from everything.
He felt as if he had left a stage behind and many actors. He felt as if he had left the great seance and all the murmuring ghosts. He was moving from an unreality that was frightening into a reality that was unreal because it was new.
The black land slid by and he was going into the country among the hills: For the first time in a dozen years the stars were coming out above him, in great processions of wheeling fire. He saw a great juggernaut of stars form in the sky and threaten to roll over and crush him.
He floated on his back when the valise filled and sank; the river was mild and leisurely, going away from the people who ate shadows for breakfast and steam for lunch and vapors for supper. The river was very real; it held him comfortably and gave him the time at last, the leisure, to consider this month, this year, and a lifetime of years. He listened to his heart slow. His thoughts stopped rushing with his blood. (140)
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(Art by Guy Billout, for cover of Thedore Roszak’s The Cult of Information – The Folklore of Computers And the True Art of Thinking, 1986 Pantheon Books Edition)
“Listen,” said Granger, taking his arm, and walking with him, holding aside the bushes to let him pass. “When I was a boy my grandfather died, and he was a sculptor. He was also a very kind man who had a lot of love to give the world, and he helped clean up the slum in our town; and he made toys for us and he did a million things in his lifetime; he was always busy with his hands. And when he died, I suddenly realized I wasn’t crying for him at all, but for the things he did. I cried because he would never do them again, he would never carve another piece of wood or help us raise doves and pigeons in the back yard or play the violin the way he did, or tell us jokes the way he did. He was part of us and when he died, all the actions stopped dead and there was no one to do them just the way he did. He was individual. He was an important man. I’ve never gotten over his death. Often I think, what wonderful carvings never came to birth because he died. How many jokes are missing from the world, and how many homing pigeons untouched by his hands. He shaped the world. He did things to the world. The world was bankrupted of ten million fine actions the night he passed on.”
***
Granger stood looking back with Montag. “Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there. It doesn’t matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.” (156-157)
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The concussion knocked the air across and down the river, turned the men over like dominoes in a line, blew the water in lifting sprays, and blew the dust and made the trees above them mourn with a great wind passing away south. Montag crushed himself down, squeezing himself small, eyes tight. He blinked once. And in that instant saw the city, instead of the bombs, in the air. They had displaced each other.
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Commander John J. Adams (Leslie Nielsen) and Lt. “Doc” Ostrow (Warren Stevens), commander and medical officer of Starship C-57D, in Forbidden Planet (1956)
Adams: So you took the brain boost, huh?
Ostrow: You ought’a see my new mind. It’s up there in lights. Bigger than his now.
C’mon, easy, doc!
Morbius, was too close to the problem. The Krell had completed their project. Big machine. No instrumentalities. True creation!
C’mon doc, let’s have it.
But the Krell forgot one thing!
Yes, what?!
Monsters, John. Monsters from the id!
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For another of those impossible instants the city stood, rebuilt and unrecognizable, taller than it had ever hoped or strived to be, taller than man had built it, erected at last in gouts of shattered concrete and sparkles of torn metal into a mural hung like a reversed avalanche, a million colors, a million oddities, a door where a window should be, a top for a bottom, a side for a back, and then the city rolled over and fell down dead. (160)
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And so, we return to where we began: summer’s end.
William Timmins’ straightforward and somewhat uninspiring covert art, though visually consistent with and appropriate for “With Folded Hands…”, belies the depth, power, and literary quality of Jack Williamson’s 1947 story. In 1954, it was expanded as Galaxy Science Fiction Novel number 21, under the title The Humanoids, with cover art by Edward Emshwiller.
The story was one of fifty science fiction stories adapted by Ernest Kinoy and George Lefferts for the NBC 1950-1951 radio program Dimension X, and broadcast on April 15, 1950. You can listen to the program here, at the American Radio Classics YouTube channel, where, oddly, it’s listed under the category of “comedy”.
“Comedy?!” Nooo… No. It’s not a comedy.
I was reminded of Williamson’s story in the mid-1990s after reading Norbert Wiener’s The Human Use of Human Beings, which I found to be eerily – nay, chillingly! – prescient (albeit now, 69 years too early…), imbued with a sense of compassion, and, composed with an almost poetic sense of language (though obviously not poetry, per se!). Above all, the “tone” of the book is one of deep humility, and, a profound, refreshing absence of the ideologically motivated hubris that passes for intellectuality, so characteristic of the current age. In this, the book’s resemblance to Sir Roger Penrose’s works on the origin and nature of consciousness is striking.
Anyway… I read With Folded Hands once again, and found that Williamson’s story had lost neither its depth nor its impact despite the passage of time. (Other science fiction stories? Not always so much.)
It’s interesting that Williamson’s story and Wiener’s book appeared within three years of one another. This may attest to a commonality of thought about the implications and effect – viewed from the perspective of the mid-twentieth century, the Second World War having ended only a few years earlier – of the intersection of and anticipation of several technological and social trends: Automation, the eventuality of artificial intelligence and machine learning (though I doubt those phrases were conceived of as such, at the time), and computer networks (the humanoids are in constant real-time communication with one another, after all), upon the economic and social “place” of men, both individually and collectively.
Excerpts from Norbert Wiener’s book (1973 Discus edition) follow, a little further down this post..
“At your service,” Mr. Underhill.” Its blind steel eyes stared straight ahead, but it was still aware of him. “What’s the matter, sir? Aren’t you happy?”
(Since creating this post in May of 2019, I’ve acquired a copy of the July, 1947, Astounding, in much better condition than the original – which is displayed at the “bottom” of this post. The “new” copy, minus chipped edges and missing corners, is shown below…)
Underhill felt cold and faint with terror. His skin turned clammy. A painful prickling came over him. His wet hand tensed on the door handle of the car, but he restrained the impulse to jump and run. That was folly. There was no escape. He made himself sit still.
“You will be happy, sir,” the mechanical promised him cheerfully. “We have learned how to make all men happy under the Prime Directive. Our service will be perfect now, at last.
Even Mr. Sledge is very happy now.”
Underhill tried to speak, but his dry throat stuck. He felt ill. The world turned dim and gray. The humanoids were prefect – no question of that. They had even learned to lie, to secure the contentment of men
He knew they had lied. That was no tumor they had removed from Sledge’s brain, but the memory, the scientific knowledge, and the bitter disillusion of their own creator. Yet he had seen that Sledge was happy now.
He tried to stop his own convulsive quivering.
“A wonderful operation!” His voice came forced and faint. “You know Aurora has had a lot of funny tenants, but that old man was the absolute limit. They very idea that he had made the humanoids, that he knew how to stop them! I always knew he must be lying!”
Stiff with terror, he made a weak and hollow laugh.
“What is the matter, Mr. Underhill?”
The alert mechanical must have perceived his shuddering illness.
“Are you unwell?”
“No, there’s nothing the matter with me,” he gasped desperately. “Absolutely nothing! I’ve just found out that I’m perfectly happy under the Prime Directive. Everything is absolutely wonderful.” His voice came dry and hoarse and wild. “You won’t have to operate on me.” The car turned off the shining avenue, taking him back to the quiet splendor of his prison. His futile hands clenched and relaxed again, folded on his knees.
There was nothing left to do.
( – Jack S. Williamson – )
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Illustration by Hubert Rogers, for Jack Williamson’s story “And Searching Mind” (Astounding Science Fiction, May, 1948 – Part III of III) (p. 118)
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The Human Use of Human Beings by Norbert Wiener Avon Books – (1950) 1973
In the myths and fairy tales that we read as children
we learned a few of the simpler and more obvious truths of life,
such as that when a djinnee is found in a bottle,
it had better be left there;
that the fisherman who craves a boon from heaven too many times on behalf of his wife
will end up exactly where he started;
that if you are given three wishes, you must be very careful what you wish for.
These simple and obvious truths represent the childish equivalent of the tragic view of life
which the Greeks and many modern Europeans possess,
and which is somehow missing in this land of plenty.
“Whether we entrust our decisions to machines of metal,
or to those machines of flesh and blood
which are bureaus and vast laboratories and armies and corporations,
we shall never receive the right answers to our questions unless we ask the right questions.”
I have said that the modem man, and especially the modern American, however much “know-how” he may have, has very little “know-what.” He will accept the superior dexterity of the machine-made decisions without too much inquiry as to the motives and principles behind these. In doing so, he will put himself sooner or later in the position of the father in W.W. Jacobs’ The Monkey’s Paw, who has wished for a hundred pounds, only to find at his door the agent of the company for which his son works, tendering him one hundred pounds as a consolation for his son’s death at the factory. Or again, he may do it in the way of the Arab fisherman in the One Thousand and One Nights, when he broke the Seal of Solomon on the lid of the bottle which contained the angry djinnee.
Let us remember that there are game-playing machines both of The Monkey’s Paw type and of the type of the Bottled Djinnee. Any machine constructed for the purpose of making decisions, if it does not possess the power of learning, will be completely literal-minded. Woe to us if we let it decide our conduct, unless we have previously examined the laws of its action, and know fully that its conduct will be carried out on principles acceptable to us! On the other hand, the machine like the djinnee which can learn and can make decisions on the basis of its learning, will in no way be obliged to make such decisions as we should have made, or will be acceptable to us. For the man who is not aware of this,
to throw the problem of his responsibility on the machine,
whether it can learn or not,
is to cast his responsibility to the winds,
and to find it coming back seated on the whirlwind.
Reference
Bova, Ben (Editor), The Science Fiction Hall of Fame – Volume IIA, Avon Books, New York, N.Y., 1973
And I’ll get a job. I’ll always be looking for a better job, but I won’t get the job I want. I’ll work really hard since as an American I wanna be rich. I’ll be always in a hurry: Time Is Money. Unfortunately, my time won’t be worth as much money as my bosses’ time. Sometimes I will have some time and I still won’t have enough money. Then I’ll start to hate the wisdom of this saying.
