Final Thoughts on The Machine Stops

There’s a lot to think about after reading such a short story, but what comes to the forefront after going through The Machine Stops again is this blaring emphasis on the necessity of a direct, firsthand human experience. Of course there were many other themes I could explore, such as those regarding the strength of faith as it consistently survives along with the human race, but I keep coming back to the prior point. With the loss of physical space and resultant loss of physical experience and prowess, the human society grew quite idle in Vashti’s world. Convenience in living area transferred to convenience in thought with the creation and ubiquity of the Machine, something already happening in our modern day world. The horrifying reality is that without self-discovery (whether it’s truly original or not), everything in the world loses meaning, including language and ideas that come with an alarming lack of emotional response because the people legitimately don’t know what to feel. My best example is when Kuno first predicts that “the Machine stops”, Vashti simply cannot comprehend what this could mean. As we later find out, she begins to slowly be consumed by fear when his prophecy rings true and their world collapses. It’s incredibly depressing to me that the only thing Vashti really experienced was the apocalypse, but it’s also a wake up call. Our worlds are almost frighteningly similar. I live in a very small space (my dorm), I am constantly trusting technological sources to retain all the non-essential knowledge, and I sometimes lack the primary experiences I wish to understand. It’s surely not the dreary and disgustingly immobile world we observe in Forster’s story, but the themes still apply.

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