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    The Human Machine
    The Human Machine
    The Human Machine
    Ebook85 pages1 hour

    The Human Machine

    By Arnold Bennett

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    About this ebook

    In a characteristic for Arnold Bennett humorous style he takes us through ideas and techniques of staying sane and mindful. The book is about an idea which can transform a human mind leading to a more meaningful, mindful life.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherThe Big Nest
    Release dateJun 10, 2016
    ISBN9781911429579
    Author

    Arnold Bennett

    Arnold Bennett was a prolific English novelist and leading realist author during the early twentieth century. In addition to his fictional work, he also wrote selected nonfiction and criticism, including his insightful book How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day.

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      Book preview

      The Human Machine - Arnold Bennett

      Arnold Bennett

      Arnold Bennett

      The Human Machine

      THE BIG NEST

      LONDON ∙ NEW YORK ∙ TORONTO ∙ SAO PAULO ∙ MOSCOW

      PARIS ∙ MADRID ∙ BERLIN ∙ ROME ∙ MEXICO CITY ∙ MUMBAI ∙ SEOUL ∙ DOHA

      TOKYO ∙ SYDNEY ∙ CAPE TOWN ∙ AUCKLAND ∙ BEIJING

      New Edition

      Published by The Big Nest

      www.thebignest.co.uk

      This Edition first published in 2016

      Copyright © 2016 The Big Nest

      Images and Illustrations © 2016 Stocklibrary.org

      All Rights Reserved.

      Contents

      I

      II

      III

      IV

      V

      VI

      VII

      VIII

      IX

      X

      XI

      XII

      XIII

      XIV

      XV

      XVI

      I

      TAKING ONESELF FOR GRANTED

      There are men who are capable of loving a machine more deeply than they can love a woman. They are among the happiest men on earth. This is not a sneer meanly shot from cover at women. It is simply a statement of notorious fact. Men who worry themselves to distraction over the perfecting of a machine are indubitably blessed beyond their kind. Most of us have known such men. Yesterday they were constructing motorcars. But to-day aeroplanes are in the air—or, at any rate, they ought to be, according to the inventors. Watch the inventors. Invention is not usually their principal business. They must invent in their spare time. They must invent before breakfast, invent in the Strand between Lyons’s and the office, invent after dinner, invent on Sundays. See with what ardour they rush home of a night! See how they seize a half-holiday, like hungry dogs a bone! They don’t want golf, bridge, limericks, novels, illustrated magazines, clubs, whisky, starting-prices, hints about neckties, political meetings, yarns, comic songs, anturic salts, nor the smiles that are situate between a gay corsage and a picture hat. They never wonder, at a loss, what they will do next. Their evenings never drag—are always too short. You may, indeed, catch them at twelve o’clock at night on the flat of their backs; but not in bed! No, in a shed, under a machine, holding a candle (whose paths drop fatness) up to the connecting-rod that is strained, or the wheel that is out of centre. They are continually interested, nay, enthralled. They have a machine, and they are perfecting it. They get one part right, and then another goes wrong; and they get that right, and then another goes wrong, and so on. When they are quite sure they have reached perfection, forth issues the machine out of the shed—and in five minutes is smashed up, together with a limb or so of the inventors, just because they had been quite sure too soon. Then the whole business starts again. They do not give up—that particular wreck was, of course, due to a mere oversight; the whole business starts again. For they have glimpsed perfection; they have the gleam of perfection in their souls. Thus their lives run away. ‘They will never fly!’ you remark, cynically. Well, if they don’t? Besides, what about Wright? With all your cynicism, have you never envied them their machine and their passionate interest in it?

      You know, perhaps, the moment when, brushing in front of the glass, you detected your first grey hair. You stopped brushing; then you resumed brushing, hastily; you pretended not to be shocked, but you were. Perhaps you know a more disturbing moment than that, the moment when it suddenly occurred to you that you had ‘arrived’ as far as you ever will arrive; and you had realised as much of your early dream as you ever will realise, and the realisation was utterly unlike the dream; the marriage was excessively prosaic and eternal, not at all what you expected it to be; and your illusions were dissipated; and games and hobbies had an unpleasant core of tedium and futility; and the ideal tobacco-mixture did not exist; and one literary masterpiece resembled another; and all the days that are to come will more or less resemble the present day, until you die; and in an illuminating flash you understood what all those people were driving at when they wrote such unconscionably long letters to the Telegraph as to life being worth living or not worth living; and there was naught to be done but face the grey, monotonous future, and pretend to be cheerful with the worm of ennui gnawing at your heart! In a word, the moment when it occurred to you that yours is ‘the common lot.’ In that moment have you not wished—do you not continually wish—for an exhaustless machine, a machine that you could never get to the end of? Would you not give your head to be lying on the flat of your back, peering with a candle, dirty, foiled, catching cold—but absorbed in the pursuit of an object? Have you not gloomily regretted that you were born without a mechanical turn, because there is really something about a machine...?

      It has never struck you that you do possess a machine! Oh, blind! Oh, dull! It has never struck you that you have at hand a machine wonderful beyond all mechanisms in sheds, intricate, delicately adjustable, of astounding and miraculous possibilities, interminably interesting! That machine is yourself. ‘This fellow is preaching. I won’t have it!’ you exclaim resentfully. Dear sir, I am not preaching, and, even if I were, I think you would have it. I think I can anyhow keep hold of your button for a while, though you pull hard. I am not preaching. I am simply bent on calling your attention to a fact which has perhaps wholly or partially escaped you—namely, that you are the most fascinating bit of machinery that ever was. You do yourself less than justice. It is said that men are only interested in themselves. The truth is that, as a rule, men are interested in every mortal thing except themselves. They have a habit of taking themselves for granted, and that habit is responsible for nine-tenths of the boredom and despair on the face of the planet.

      A man will wake up in the middle of the night (usually owing to some form of delightful excess), and his brain will be very active indeed for a space ere he can go to sleep again. In that candid hour, after the exaltation of the evening and before the hope of the dawn, he will see everything in its true colours—except himself. There is nothing like a sleepless couch for a clear vision of one’s environment. He will see all his wife’s faults and the hopelessness of trying to cure them. He will momentarily see,

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