The Voice of the Machines Part 6

Is there any one to-day so small as to know where he is? I am always coming suddenly upon my body, crying out with joy like a child in the dark, "And I am here, too!"

Has the twentieth century, I have wondered, a man in it who shall feel Himself?

And so it has come to pa.s.s, this vision I have seen with my own eyes--Man, my Brother, with his mean, absurd little unfinished body, going triumphant up and down the earth making limbs of Time and s.p.a.ce.

Who is there who has not seen it, if only through the peephole of a dream--the whole earth lying still and strange in the hollow of his hand, the sea waiting upon him? Thousands of times I have seen it, the whole earth with a look, wrapped white and still in its ball of mist, the glint of the Atlantic on it, and in the blue place the vision of the ships.

Between the seas and skies The Shuttle flies Seven sunsets long, tropic-deep, Thousand-sailed, Half in waking, half in sleep.

Glistening calms and shouting gales Water-gold and green, And many a heavenly-minded blue It thrusts and shudders through, Past my starlight, Past the glow of suns I know, Weaving fates, Loves and hates In the Sea-- The stately Shuttle To and fro, Mast by mast, Through the farthest bounds of moons and noons.

Flights of Days and Nights Flies fast.

It may be true, as the poets are telling us, that this fashion the modern man has, of reaching out with steel and vapor and smoke, and holding a star silently in his hand, has no poetry in it, and that machinery is not a fit subject for poets. Perhaps. I am merely judging for myself. I have seen the few poets of this modern world crowded into their corner of it (in Westminster Abbey), and I have seen also a great foundry chiming its epic up to the night, freeing the bodies and the souls of men around the world, beating out the floors of cities, making the limbs of the great ships silently striding the sea, and rolling out the roads of continents.

If this is not poetry, it is because it is too great a vision. And yet there are times I am inclined to think when it brushes against us--against all of us. We feel Something there. More than once I have almost touched the edge of it. Then I have looked to see the man wondering at it. But he puts up his hands to his eyes, or he is merely hammering on something. Then I wish that some one would be born for him, and write a book for him, a book that should come upon the man and fold him in like a cloud, breathe into him where his wonder is. He ought to have a book that shall be to him like a whole Age--the one he lives in, coming to him and leaning over him, whispering to him, "Rise, my Son and live. Dost thou not behold thy hands and thy feet?"

The trains like spirits flock to him.

There are days when I can read a time-table. When I put it back in my pocket it sings.

In the time-table I carry in my pocket I unfold the earth.

I have come to despise poets and dreams. Truths have made dreams pale and small. What is wanted now is some man who is literal enough to tell the truth.

II

THE IDEA OF SIZE

Sometimes I have a haunting feeling that the other readers of Mount Tom (besides me) may not be so tremendously interested after all in machinery and interpretations of machinery. Perhaps they are merely being polite about the subject while up here with me on the mountain, not wanting to interrupt exactly and not talking back. It is really no place for talking back, perhaps they think, on a mountain. But the trouble is, I get more interested than other people before I know it.

Then suddenly it occurs to me to wonder if they are listening particularly and are not looking off at the scenery and the river and the hills and the meadow while I wander on about railroad trains and symbolism and the Mount Tom Pulp Mill and socialism and electricity and Schopenhauer and the other things, tracking out relations. It gets worse than other people's genealogies.

But all I ask is, that when they come, as they are coming now, just over the page to some more of these machine ideas, or interpretations as one might call them, or impressions, or orgies with engines, they will not drop the matter altogether. They may not feel as I do. It would be a great disappointment to all of us, perhaps, if I could be agreed with by everybody; but boring people is a serious matter--boring them all the time, I mean. It's no more than fair, of course, that the subscribers to a magazine should run some of the risk--as well as the editor--but I do like to think that in these next few pages there are--spots, and that people will keep hopeful.

Some people are very fond of looking up at the sky, taking it for a regular exercise, and thinking how small they are. It relieves them. I do not wish to deny that there is a certain luxury in it. But I must say that for all practical purposes of a mind--of having a mind--I would be willing to throw over whole hours and days of feeling very small, any time, for a single minute of feeling big. The details are more interesting. Feeling small, at best, is a kind of glittering generality.

I do not think I am altogether unaware how I look from a star--at least I have spent days and nights practising with a star, looking down from it on the thing I have agreed for the time being (whatever it is) to call myself, and I have discovered that the real luxury for me does not consist in feeling very small or even in feeling very large. The luxury for me is in having a regular reliable feeling, every day of my life, that I have been made on purpose--and very conveniently made, to be infinitely small or infinitely large as I like. I arrange it any time. I find myself saying one minute, "Are not the whole human race my house-servants? Is not London my valet--always at my door to do my bidding? Clouds do my errands for me. It takes a world to make room for my body. My soul is furnished with other worlds I cannot see."

The next minute I find myself saying nothing. The whole star I am on is a bit of pale yellow down floating softly through s.p.a.ce. What I really seem to enjoy is a kind of insured feeling. Whether I am small or large all s.p.a.ce cannot help waiting upon me--now that I have taken iron and vapor and light and made hands for my hands, millions of them, and reached out with them. A little one shall become a thousand.

I have abolished all size--even my own size does not exist. If all the work that is being done by the hands of my hands had literally to be done by men, there would not be standing room for them on the globe--comfortable standing room. But even though, as it happens, much of the globe is not very good to stand on, and vast tracts of it, every year, are going to waste, it matters nothing to us. Every thing we touch is near or far, or large or small, as we like. As long as a young woman can sit down by a loom which is as good as six hundred more just like her, and all in a few square feet--as long as we can do up the whole of one of Napoleon's armies in a ball of dynamite, or stable twelve thousand horses in the boiler of an ocean steamer, it does not make very much difference what kind of a planet we are on, or how large or small it is. If suddenly it sometimes seems as if it were all used up and things look cramped again (which they do once in so often) we have but to think of something, invent something, and let it out a little. We move over into a new world in a minute. Columbus was mere bagatelle. We get continents every few days. Thousands of men are thinking of them--adding them on. Mere size is getting to be old-fashioned--as a way of arranging things. It has never been a very big earth--at best--the way G.o.d made it first. He made a single spider that could weave a rope out of her own body around it. It can be ticked all through, and all around, with the thoughts of a man. The universe has been put into a little telescope and the oceans into a little compa.s.s. Alice in Wonderland's romantic and clever way with a pill is become the barest matter of fact. Looking at the world a single moment with a soul instead of a theodolite, no one who has ever been on it--before--would know it. It's as if the world were a little wizened balloon that had been given us once and had been used so for thousands of years, and we had just lately discovered how to blow it.

III

THE IDEA OF LIBERTY

Some one told me one morning not so very long ago that the sun was getting a mile smaller across every ten years. It gave me a shut-in and helpless feeling. I found myself several times during that day looking at it anxiously. I almost held my hands up to it to warm them.

I knew in a vague fashion that it would last long enough for me. And a mile in ten years was not much. It did not take much figuring to see that I had not the slightest reason to be anxious. But my feelings were hurt. I felt as if something had hit the universe. I could not get myself--and I have not been able to get myself since--to look at it impersonally. I suppose every man lives in some theory of the universe, unconsciously, every day, as much as he lives in the sunlight. And he does not want it disturbed. I have always felt safe before. And, what was a necessary part of safety with me, I have felt that history was safe--that there was going to be enough of it.

I have been in the world a good pleasant while on the whole, tried it and got used to it--used to the weather on it and used to having my friends hate me and my enemies turn on me and love me, and the other uncertainties; but all the time, when I looked up at the sun and saw it, or thought of it down under the world, I counted on it. I discovered that my soul had been using it daily as a kind of fulcrum for all things. I helped G.o.d lift with it. It was obvious that it was going to be harder for both of us--a mere matter of time. I could not get myself used to the thought. Every fresh look I took at the sun peeling off mile after mile up there, as fast as I lived, fl.u.s.tered me--made my sky less useful to me, less convenient to rest in. I found myself trying slowly to see how this universe would look--what it would be like, if I were the last man on it. Somebody would have to be. It would be necessary to justify things for him. He would probably be too tired and cold to do it. So I tried.

I had a good deal the same experience with Mount Pelee last summer. I resented being cooped up helplessly, on a planet that leaked.

The fact that it leaked several thousand miles away, and had made a comparatively safe hole for it, out in the middle of the sea, only afforded momentary relief. The hurt I felt was deeper than that. It could not be remedied by a mere applying long distances to it. It was underneath down in my soul. Time and s.p.a.ce could not get at it. The feeling that I had been trapped in a planet somehow, and that I could not get off possibly, the feeling that I had been deliberately taken body and soul, without my knowing it and without my ever having been asked, and set down on a cooled-off cinder to live, whether I wanted to or not--the sudden new appalling sense I had, that the ground underneath my feet was not really good and solid, that I was living every day of my life just over a roar of great fire, that I was being asked (and everybody else) to make history and build stone houses, and found inst.i.tutions and things on the bare outside--the destroyed and ruined part of a ball that had been tossed out in s.p.a.ce to burn itself up--the sense, on top of all this, that this dried crust I live on, or bit of caked ashes, was liable to break through suddenly at any time and pour down the center of the earth on one's head, did not add to the dignity, it seemed to me, or the self-respect of human life. "You might as well front the facts, my dear youth, look Mount Pelee in the face," I tried to say coldly and calmly to myself. "Here you are, set down helplessly among stars, on a great round blue and green something all fire and wind inside. And it is all liable--this superficial crust or geological ice you are on--perfectly liable, at any time or any place after this, to let through suddenly and dump all the nations and all ancient and modern history, and you and Your Book, into this awful ceaseless abyss--of boiled mountains and stewed up continents that is seething beneath your feet."

It is hard enough, it seems to me, to be an optimist on the edge of this earth as it is, to keep on believing in people and things on it, without having to believe besides that the earth is a huge round swindle just of itself, going round and round through all heaven, with all of us on it, laughing at us.

I felt chilled through for a long time after Mount Pelee broke out. I went wistfully about sitting in sunny and windless places trying to get warmed all summer. And it was not all in my soul. It was not all subjective. I noticed that the thermometer was caught the same way. It was a plain case enough--it seemed to me--the heater I lived on had let through, spilled out and wasted a lot of its fire, and the ground simply could not get warmed up after it. I sat in the sun and pictured the earth freezing itself up slowly and deliberately, on the outside.

I had it all arranged in my mind. The end of the world was not coming as the ancients saw it, by a kind of overflow of fire, but by the fires going out. A mile off the sun every ten years (this for the loss of outside heat) and volcanoes and things (for the inside heat), and gradually between being frozen under us, and frozen over us, both, both sides at once, the human race would face the situation. We would have to learn to live together. Any one could see that. The human race was going to be one long row, sometime--great nations of us and little ones all at last huddled up along the equator to keep warm. Just outside of this a little way, it would be perfectly empty star, all in a swirl of snowdrifts.

I do not claim that it was very scientific to feel in this way, but I have always had, ever since I can remember, a moderate or decent human interest in the universe as a universe, and I had always felt as if the earth had made, for all practical purposes, a sort of contract with the human race, and when it acted like this--cooled itself off all of a sudden, in the middle of a hot summer, and all to show off a comparatively unknown and unimportant mountain hid on an island far out at sea--I could not conceal from myself (in my present and usual capacity as a kind of agent or sponsor for humanity) that there was something distinctly jarring about it and disrespectful. I felt as if we had been trifled with. It was not a feeling I had very long--this injured feeling toward the universe in behalf of the man in it, but I could not help it at first. There grew an anger within me and then out of the anger a great delight. It seemed to me I saw my soul standing afar off down there, on its cold and emptied-looking earth.

Then slowly I saw it was the same soul I had always had. I was standing as I had always stood on an earth before, be it a bare or flowering one. I saw myself standing before all that was. Then I defied the heaven over my head and the ground under my feet not to keep me strong and glad before G.o.d. I saw that it mattered not to me, of an earth, how bare it was, or could be, or could be made to be; if the soul of a man could be kept burning on it, victory and gladness would be alive upon it. I fell to thinking of the man. I took an inventory down in my being of all that the man was, of the might of the spirit that was in him. Would it be anything new to the man to be maltreated, a little, neglected--almost outwitted by a universe? Had he not already, thousands of times in the history of this planet, flung his spirit upon the cold, and upon empty s.p.a.ce--and made homes out of it? He had snuggled in icebergs. He had entered the place of the mighty heat and made the coolness of shadow out of it.

It was nothing new. The planet had always been a little queer. It was when it commenced. The only difference would seem to be that, instead of having the earth at first the way it is going to be by and by apparently--an earth with a little rim of humanity around it, great nations toeing the equator to live--everything was turned around. All the young nations might have been seen any day crowded around the ends or tips of the earth to keep from falling into the fire that was still at work on the middle of it, finishing it off and getting it ready to have things happen on it. Boys might have been seen almost any afternoon, in those early days, going out to the north pole and playing duck on the rock to keep from being too warm.

It is a mere matter of opinion or of taste--the way a planet acts at any given time. Now it is one way and now another, and we do as we like.

I do not pretend to say in so many words if the sun grew feeble, just what the man would do, down in his snowdrifts. But I know he would make some kind of summer out of them. One cannot help feeling that if the sun went out, it would be because he wanted it to--had arranged something, if nothing but a good bit of philosophy. It is not likely that the man has defied the heavens and the earth all these centuries for nothing. The things they have done against him have been the making of him. When he found this same sun we are talking about, in the earliest days of all, was a sun that kept running away from him and left him in a great darkness half of every day he lived, he knew what to do. Every time that Heaven has done anything to him, he has had his answer ready. The man who finds himself on a planet that is only lighted part of the time, is merely reminded that he must think of something. He digs light out of the ground and glows up the world with her own sap. When he finds himself living on an earth that can only be said to be properly heated a small fraction of the year, he makes the earth itself to burn itself and keep him warm. Things like this are small to us. We put coal through a desire and take the breath out of its dark body, and put it in pipes, and cook our food with poisons. We take water and burn it into air and we telegraph boilers, and flash mills around the earth on poles. We move vast machines with a little throb, like light. We put a street on a wire. Great crowds in the great cities--whole blocks of them--are handed along day and night like dots and dashes in telegrams. A man cannot be stopped by a breath. We save a man up in his own whisper hundreds of years when he is dead. A human voice that reaches only a few yards makes thousands of miles of copper talk. Then we make the thousand miles talk without the copper wire. We stand on the sh.o.r.e and beat the air with a thought thousands of miles away--make it whisper for us to ships. One need not fear for a man like this--a man who has made all the earth a deed, an action of his own soul, who has thrown his soul at last upon the waste of heaven and made words out of it. One cannot but believe that a man like this is a free man. Let what will happen to the sun that warms him or the star that seems just now his foothold in s.p.a.ce. All shall be as his soul says when his soul determines what it shall say. Fire and wind and cold--when his soul speaks--and Invisibility itself and Nothing are his servants.

The vision of a little helpless human race huddled in the tropics saying its last prayers, holding up its face to a far-off neglected-looking universe, warming its hands at the stars--the vision of all the great peoples of the earth squeezed up into Esquimaux, in furs up to their eyes, stamping their feet on the equator to keep warm, is merely the sort of vision that one set of scientists gloats on giving us. One needs but to look for what the other set is saying.

It has not time to be saying much, but what it practically says is: "Let the sun wizen up if it wants to. There will be something.

Somebody will think of something. Possibly we are outgrowing suns. At all events to a real man any little accident or bruise to the planet he's on is a mere suggestion of how strong he is. Some new beautiful impossibility--if the truth were known--is just what we are looking for."

A human race which makes its car wheels and napkins out of paper, its street pavements out of gla.s.s, its railway ties out of old shoes, which draws food out of air, which winds up operas on spools, which has its way with oceans, and plays chess with the empty ether that is over the sea--which makes clouds speak with tongues, which lights railway trains with pin-wheels and which makes its cars go by stopping them, and heats its furnaces with smoke--it would be very strange if a race like this could not find some way at least of managing its own planet, and (heaped with snowdrifts though it be) some way of warming it, or of melting off a place to live on. A corporation was formed down in New Jersey the other day to light a city by the tossing of the waves. We are always getting some new grasp--giving some new sudden almost humorous stretch to matter. We keep nature fairly smiling at herself. One can hardly tell, when one hears of half the new things nowadays--actual facts--whether to laugh or cry, or form a stock company or break out into singing. No one would dare to say that a thousand years from now we will not have found some other use for moonlight than for love affairs and to haul tides with. We will be manufacturing noon yet, out of compressed starlight, and heating houses with it. It will be peddled about the streets like milk, from door to door in cases and bottles.

First and last, whatever else may be said of us, we do as we like with a planet. Nothing it can do to us, nothing that can happen to it, outwits us--at least more than a few hundred years at a time. The idea that we cannot even keep warm on it is preposterous. Nothing would be more likely--almost any time now--than for some one to decide that we ought to have our continents warmed more, winters. It would not be much, as things are going, to remodel the floors of a few of our continents--put in registers and things, have the heat piped up from the center of the earth. The best way to get a faint idea of what science is going to be like the next few thousand years, is to pick out something that could not possibly be so and believe it. We manufacture ice in July by boiling it, and if we cannot warm a planet as we want to--at least a few furnished continents--with hot things, we will do it with cold ones, or by rubbing icebergs together. If one wants a good simple working outfit for a prophet in science and mechanics, all one has to do is to think of things that are unexpected enough, and they will come to pa.s.s. A scientist out in the Northwest has just finished his plans for getting hold of the other end of the force of gravity. The general idea is to build a sort of tower or flag-pole on the planet--something that reaches far enough out over the edge to get an underhold as it were--grip hold of the force of gravity where it works backwards. Of course, as anyone can see at a glance, when it is once built out with steel, the first forty miles or so (workmen using compressed air and tubular trolleys, etc.), everything on the tower would pull the other way and the pressure would gradually be relieved until the thing balanced itself. When completed it could be used to draw down electricity from waste s.p.a.ce (which has as much as everybody on this planet could ever want, and more). What a little earth like ours would develop into, with a connection like this--a sort of umbilical cord to the infinite--no one would care to try to say. It would at least be a kind of planet that would always be sure of anything it wanted. When we had used up all the raw material or live force in our own world we could draw on the others. At the very least we would have a sort of signal station to the planets in general that would be useful. They would know what we want, and if we could not get it from them they would tell us where we could.

All this may be a little mixing perhaps. It is always difficult to tell the difference between the sublime and the ridiculous in talking of a being like man. It is what makes him sublime--that there is no telling about him--that he is a great, l.u.s.ty, rollicking, easy-going son of G.o.d and throws off a world every now and then, or puts one on, with quips and jests. When the laugh dies away his jokes are prophecies. It behooves us therefore to walk softly, you and I, Gentle Reader, while we are here with him--while this dear gentle ground is still beneath our feet. There is no telling his reach. Let us notice stars more.

In the meantime it does seem to me that a comparatively simple affair like this one single planet, need not worry us much.

I still keep seeing it--I cannot help it--I always keep seeing it--eternities at a time, warm, convenient, and comfortable, the same old green and white, with all its improvements on it, whatever the sun does. And above all I keep seeing the Man on it, full of defiance and of love and worship, being born and buried--the little-great man, running about and strutting, flying through s.p.a.ce on it, all his interests and his loves wound about it like clouds, but beckoning to worlds as he flies. And whatever the Man does with the other worlds or with this one, I always keep seeing this one, the same old stand or deck in eternity, for praying and singing and living, it always was.

Long after I am dead, oh, dear little planet, least and furthest breath that is blown on thy face, my soul flocks to you, rises around you, and looks back upon you and watches you down there in your round white cloud, rowing faithfully through s.p.a.ce!

IV

THE IDEA OF IMMORTALITY