Finally got around to reading H.G Wells’ the Time Machine. It’s a short read at just over 100 pages, but well worth it. It’s a book that ought to have been longer in parts and shorter in others, but packed with some fascinating ideas and beautiful language. As you start to reach the end, you realise how much more of it you want.
“…one of those men who is too clever to be believed: you never felt that you saw all around him; you always suspected some subtle reserve, some ingenuity in ambush, behind his lucid frankness.”
“Seeing the ease and security in which these people were living, I felt that this close resemblance of the sexes was after all what one would expect; for the strength of a man and the softness of a women, the institution of the family, and the differentiation of occupations were mere militant necessities of an age of physical force; where population is balanced and abundant, much child-bearing becomes and evil rather than a blessing to the State; where violence comes but rarely and off-spring are secure, there is less necessity – indeed there is no necessity – for an effective family, and the specialization of the sexes with reference to their children’s needs disappears. We see some beginnings of this even in our own time, and in this future age, it was complete.”
“Under the new conditions of perfect comfort and security, that restless energy, that with us is strength, would become weakness.”
“Physical courage and the love of battle, for instance are no great help – may even be hindrances – to a civilised man.”
“For countless years I judged there had been no danger of war or solitary violence, no danger from wild beasts, no wasting disease to require strength of constitution, no need of toil. For such a life, what we should call the weak are as well equipped as the strong, are indeed no longer weak. Better equipped indeed they are, for the strong would be fretted by an energy for which there was no outlet. No doubt the exquisite beauty of the buildings I saw was the outcome of the last surgings of the now purposeless energy of mankind before it settled down into perfect harmony with the conditions under which it lived–the flourish of that triumph which began the last great peace. This has ever been the fate of energy in security; it takes to art and to eroticism, and then come languor and decay.”
“At first, proceeding from the problems of our own age, it seemed clear as daylight to me that the gradual widening of the present merely temporary and social difference between the Capitalist and the Labourer, was the key to the whole position…
“There is a tendency to utilize underground space for the less ornamental purposes of civilisation…Even now, does not an East-end worker live in such artificial conditions as practically to be cut off from the natural surface of the earth?”
“And this same widening gulf–which is due to the length and expense of the higher educational process and the increased facilities for and temptations towards refined habits on the part of the rich–will make that exchange between class and class, that promotion by intermarriage which at present retards the splitting of our species along lines of social stratification, less and less frequent.“
“…above ground you must have the Haves, pursuing pleasure and comfort and beauty, and below ground the Have-nots, the Workers getting continually adapted to the conditions of their labour. Once they were there, they would no doubt have to pay rent, and not a little of it, for the ventilation of their caverns; and if they refused, they would starve or be suffocated for arrears. Such of them as were so constituted as to be miserable and rebellious would die; and, in the end, the balance being permanent, the survivors would become as well adapted to the conditions of underground life, and as happy in their way, as the Upperworld people were to theirs.”
“It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble. An animal perfectly in harmony with its environment is a perfect mechanism.”
“Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless.”
“There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change. Only those animals partake of intelligence that have a huge variety of needs and dangers.”
“He, I know – for the question had been discussed among us long before the Time Machine was made – thought but cheerlessly of the Advancement of Mankind, and saw in the growing pile of civilisation only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end.”
“…even when Mind and strength had gone, gratitude and a mutual tenderness still lived on in the heart of Man”
My Random Thoughts 