Working Notes: a commonplace notebook for recording & exploring ideas.
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— Kunal
Stumbled upon this book at the lovely Green Apple Books at San Francisco airport and -- in an uncharacteristic display of wisdom -- didn't start reading it till almost the end of the flight.
A couple of pages near the beginning of the book stood out enough that I had to record them before getting too far ahead:
Numerous, nevertheless, are the moralists who have attacked the machine as the source of all the ills we bear, who, creating a fictitious dichotomy, have denounced the mechanical civilization as the enemy of the spiritual civilization.
[...]
The central struggle of men has ever been to understand one another, to join together for the common weal. And it is this very thing that the machine helps them to do! It begins by annihilating time and space.
[...]
But we lack perspective for the judgment of transformations that go so deep. What are the hundred years of the history of the machine compared with the two hundred thousand years of the history of man? It was only yesterday that we began to pitch our camp in this country of laboratories and power stations, that we took possession of this new, this still unfinished, house we live in. Everything round is new and different -- our concerns, our working habits, our relations with one another.
Our very psychology has been shaken to its foundations, to its most secret recesses. Our notions of separation, absence, distance, return, are reflections of a new set of realities, though the words themselves remain unchanged. To grasp the meaning of the world of today we use a language created to express the world of yesterday. The life of the past seems to us nearer our true natures, but only for the reason that it is nearer our language. Every step on the road of progress takes us farther from habits which, as the life of man goes, we had only recently begun to acquire. We are in truth emigrants who have not yet founded our homeland. We Europeans have become again young peoples, without tradition or language of our own. We shall have to age somewhat before we are able to write the folksongs of a new epoch.
Young barbarians still marveling at our new toys -- that is what we are. Why else should we race our planes, give prizes to those who fly highest, or fastest? We take no heed to ask ourselves why we race: the race itself is more important than the object.
[...]
In the enthusiasm of our rapid mechanical conquests we have overlooked some things. We have perhaps driven men into the service of the machine, instead of building machinery for the service of man. But could anything be more natural? So lang as we were engaged in conquest, our spirit was the spirit of conquerors. The time has now come when we must be colonists, must make this house habitable which is still without character. Little by little the machine will become part of humanity.
[...]
Every machine will gradually take on this patina and lose its identity in its function.
As I read the rest of the book I'm astonished at his adventures and frequent crashes & rescues; wandering through the desert and managing to escape.
Unfortunately several comments in the book turned out to be fairly racist towards the end which I didn't particularly appreciate, making it hard to recommend the second half of the book.