Bob speaks with author and scholar Lawrence Weschler, who shares astonishment that The Machine Stops could — from very few data points — extrapolate our present, so paradoxically connected and detached. * FULL TRANSCRIPT * TEDDY ROOSEVELT: Surely there never was a fight better worth making than the one which we are in. GARFIELD: Welcome to Bully Pulpit. That was Teddy Roosevelt, I’m Bob Garfield. This is Episode 7: Back to the Future. It’s a special episode, featuring not an essay or an interview exactly but a conversation — a literary conversation no less — with author Lawrence Weschler. The subject is a 12,000-word novella called The Machine Stops, and the occasion, for reasons that soon will be apparent, is the Venice Architecture Biennale. This is an abridged version of our back-and-forth for that audience. Now you may know Ren Weschler from his decades as a staff writer for the New Yorker, or for his dozen-some books on subjects as varied as Chilean torture, Polish liberation politics and his Boswell-ish engagements with such pioneering artists as David Hockney, Robert Irwin and the maker of hand-inked paper-money facsimiles, JSG Boggs. And so much more, because he is a journalist of astonishing scope and erudition, as you are about to ear-witness. At some points I may interrupt the Venice conversation for a clarifying point. Meantime, for reasons that will also soon be obvious, we will begin not with a description of The Machine Stops, but of Ren reading the first page or two. WESCHLER: Imagine, if you can, a small room, hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a bee. It is lighted neither by window nor by lamp, yet it is filled with a soft radiance. There are no apertures for ventilation, yet the air is fresh. There are no musical instruments, and yet, at the moment that my meditation opens, this room is throbbing with melodious sounds. An armchair is in the centre, by its side a reading-desk — that is all the furniture. And in the armchair there sits swaddled a lump of flesh — a woman, about five feet high, with a face as white as fungus. It is to her that the little room belongs. An electric bell rang. The woman touched a switch and the music went silent. “I suppose I must see who it is”, she thought, and set her chair in motion. The chair, like the music, was worked by machinery and it rolled her to the other side of the room where the bell still rang importuningy. “Who is it?” she called. Her voice was irritable, for she had been interrupted often since the music began. She knew several thousand people, in certain directions human intercourse had advanced considerably. But when she listened into the receiver, her white face wrinkled into smiles, and she said: Very well. Let’s talk, I will isolate myself. I do not expect anything important will happen for the next five minutes — for I can give you fully five minutes, Kuno. Then I must deliver my lecture. She touched the isolation knob, so that no one else could speak to her. Then she touched the lighting apparatus, and the little room was plunged into darkness. “Be quick!” She called, her irritation returning. “Be quick, Kuno; here I am in the dark wasting my time.” But it was fully fifteen seconds before the round plate that she held in her hands began to glow. A faint blue light shot across it, darkening to purple, and presently she could see the image of her son, who lived on the other side of the world, and he could see her. “Kuno, how slow you are.” He smiled gravely. “I readily believe you enjoy dawdling.” “I have called you before, mother, but you were always busy or isolated. And I have something particular to say.” “What is it, dearest boy? Be quick. Why could you not send it by pneumatic post?” “Because I prefer saying such a thing. I want —” “Well?” “I want you to come and see me.” Vashti watched his face in the blue plate. “But I can see you!” she exclaimed. “What more do you want?” “I want to see you not through the Machine,” said Kuno. “I want to speak to you not through the wearisome Machine.” “Oh, hush!” said the mother, vaguely shocked. “You mustn’t say anything against the Machine.” “Why not?” “One just mustn’t.” “You talk as if a god had made the Machine,” he cried. “I believe that you pray to it when you are unhappy. Man made it, do not forget that. Great men, but men. The Machine is much, but it is not everything. I see something like you in the plate, but I do not see you. I hear something like you through this telephone, but I do not hear you. That is why I want you to come. Pay me a visit, so that we can meet face to face, and talk about the hopes that are in my mind.” And it goes on from there. GARFIELD: Well, thank you, Ren. As you in our audience have by now divined, The Machine Stops is a work of science fiction depicting a techno totalitarian state in which citizens from their hexagonal hive quarters conduct their lives almost entirely mediated by an internet called The Machine. And as we'll discuss, it really kind of nails some of the biggest issues we face as Earthlings in 2021, Ren so far so good. Fair description? WESCHLER: I think that's good. Keep going. GARFIELD: All right. The Machine Stops portrays a dystopian future society, denuded as will learn of trees and of real human contact, where physicality is not really déclassé, but bred out of the species all together. The inhabitants of this world are flaccid and lumpen and pale and depend on the Machine to the limit to deliver them, not just images on the screen, but through that network of tubes the food and oxygen they need to sustain them. WESCHLER: They're all living underground. GARFIELD: Oh, and they're living underground. Stop me if I'm getting any of this wrong, if there's any other additions. WESCHLER: Something appears to have happened on Earth, on the surface, and everybody's been moved underground and is living in a hive of hexagonal rooms. GARFIELD: Exactly. So here's the thing. To read The Machine Stops is to immediately think of other fictional techno dystopias from which such a scenario would seem to derive. George Orwell's 1984, written in 1949. and Aldous Huxley's Brave New Worldfrom the year 1932, each depicting authoritarian societies which controlled the population through centralized media and creature comforts to make individuals docile and compliant. But Ren, you stubbornly refuse to call this story derivative of either Orwell or Huxley. Why is that? WESCHLER: Because it was written in 1909, by E.M. Forster. And it's amazing because we don't think of E.M. Forster, who we associate with those of us who either read it in college or went to the movies, we associate it with A Room with a View, which is a book that came out just before he wrote this, or , which is a book that came out just after. He wrote it in 1909. And as we'll discuss as we go on, it is unbelievable how he nails the current moment. He nailed the current moment even three or four years ago, but after Covid, it completely nails the current moment. It’s, it is absolutely amazing that he would have had this vision in 1909. A few thoughts on that and then we'll go back to the story itself. I've been doing some reading of his biography, in various biographies, and all of them quote this very seminal diary entry he had in January, 1908. So this is a year before he wrote the story. And he's all upset because that morning comes news. Well: Last Monday, a man named Farman flew a three quarter mile circuit in one and a half minutes. He's talking about planes, airplanes, the early airplanes. It's coming quickly. And if I live to be old, I shall see the sky as pestilential as the roads. It really is a new civilization coming. I have been born at the end of the age of peace and can't expect to feel anything but despair. Science, instead of freeing man — the Greeks nearly freed him by right feeling — is enslaving him to machines. Nationality will go, but the brotherhood of man will not come. No doubt the men of the past were mistaken in thinking dulce decorum est pro patria mori — it's beautiful to die for one's country — but the war of the future [this is 1909] will make no pretense of beauty or of being the conflict of ideas. God, what a prospect. The little houses that I'm used to will be swept away. The fields will stink of petrol and the airships will shatter the stars. Man may get a new and perhaps a greater soul for the new conditions, but such a soul as mine will be crushed out. GARFIELD: He was a hell of an extrapolator. WESCHLER: Yeah, you can see it going from there. By the way, it reminds me of an amazing passage from Henry James writing to a friend in 1914. In August, 1914: Black and hideous to me is the tragedy that is gathering and I'm sick beyond cure to have lived on to see it. You and I, the ornaments of our generation should have been spared this wreck of our belief that through the long years we had seen civilization grow and the worst become impossible. The tide that bore us along was then all the while moving to this, it's Grand Niagara. Yet what a blessing we didn't know it. GARFIELD: OK, as threatened, popping in here after the fact to point out what Ren and I failed to remind the audience — which is that Henry James was responding to the outbreak of World War I and the shattering realization that evolved societies can devolve in the worst way — which he simply did not see coming. WESCHLER: Interesting thing there is that in many ways Forster did. And for that matter, it was this fantasy that both Foster and James had that, this was a time of civility and so forth, completely occludes what was, for example, taking place in Africa and in imperialism all over the world and that wasn't going to lead directly to World War I. By the way, one other thing to say about 1909 before we go on is, 1909 is not just an average year. 1909 is the year that
