aw ram looks cute too. labelle needs a haircut. maybe some lysol too.
hey breeg I read The Machine Stops today. I read it before, ages ago, but I didn't appreciate it like I did this time. It is GREAT. Full of good stuff. For example the exits of the underground cities are called vomitoriums. vomitoriums were where romans would go during their feasts to purge in order to eat more. and what is the theme of the tale: decadence. brilliant! plus it was set during the fall of the british empire which mirrors the fall of the roman... awesome story.
the last page is fucking intense:
They wept for humanity, those two, not for themselves. They could not bear that this
should be the end. Ere silence was completed their hearts were opened, and they knew
what had been important on the earth. Man, the flower of all flesh, the noblest of all
creatures visible, man who had once made god in his image, and had mirrored his strength
on the constellations, beautiful naked man was dying, strangled in the garments that he had
woven. Century after century had he toiled, and here was his reward. Truly the garment
had seemed heavenly at first, shot with colours of culture, sewn with the threads of selfdenial.
And heavenly it had been so long as it was a garment and no more, man could shed
it at will and live by the essence that is his soul, and the essence, equally divine, that is his
body. The sin against the body—it was for that they wept in chief; the centuries of wrong
against the muscles and the nerves, and those five portals by which we can alone apprehend
— glozing it over with talk of evolution, until the body was white pap, the home of ideas
as colourless, last sloshy stirrings of a spirit that had grasped the stars.
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