Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: II AS SEEN THROUGH A HATCHWAY IN its present importance as a factor in life and a modifier of its conditions, the machine is in every sense a new and unprecedented fact The machine has no traditions. The only way to take a traditional stand with regard to life or the representation of life to-day, is to leave the machine out. It has always been left out. Leaving it out has made little difference. Only a small portion of the people of the world have had to be left out with it. Not to see poetry in the machinery of this present age, is not to see poetry in the life of the age. It is not to believe in the age. The first fact a man encounters in this modern world, after his mother's face, is the machine. The moment be begins to think outwards, he thinks toward a machine. The bed he lies in was sawed and planed by a machine, or cast in a foundry. The windows he looks out of were built in mills. His knife and fork were madeby steam. His food has come through rollers and wheels. The water he drinks is pumped to him by engines. The ice in it was frozen by a factory and the cloth of the clothes he wears was flashed together by looms. The machine does not end here. When he grows to years of discretion and looks about him to choose a place for himself in life, he finds that that place must come to him out of a machine. By the side of a machine of one sort or another, whether it be of steel rods and wheels or of human beings' souls, he must find his place in the great whirling system of the order of mortal lives, and somewhere in the system—that is, the Machine—be the ratchet, drive-wheel, belt, or spindle under infinite space, ordained for him to be from the beginning of the world. The moment he begins to think, a human being finds himself facing a huge, silent, blue- and-g...