Personality in "The Machine Stops"
“And in time” – his voice rose– “there will come a generation that had got beyond facts, beyond impressions, a generation absolutely colorless, a generation ‘seraphically free From taint of personality,’ which will see the French Revolution not as it happened, nor as they would like it to have happened, but as it would have happened, had it taken place in the days of the Machine” (Forster, 70). I decided to write about this sentence from E. M. Forster’s 1909 short story “The Machine Stops” because I think it really illuminates the mindset and ideology of the people living in a Machine-dominated world. This quote is from an incredibly well-received speech given by a lecturer after respirators, and by extension the only real way of interacting with the world outside the Machine, are banned. Humanity has become so internalized to the point where they explicitly forbid anything new from the outside, and no one cares (except for a few lecturers who quickly give in). The stated goal is for t...