Of Air Castles on Marble Floors

The day was bad even before it was day yet. I had two TOK essays and one English essay due, all three of which had to be sent off to the IB for evaluation. They all accounted for between 10% and 20% of my final grade in all those various subjects. I began working at them at about three past twelve in the morning, but was just far too tired to be productive. I set the alarm for twenty past twelve. Just 20 minutes, I told myself, would be enough to get a power nap and re-charge. The alarm might have gone off, but I simply didn’t hear it. When I finally woke up, it was morning. 6 o’clock. I told myself – half an hour to spare. I could still do something…

It was break time. Memories of the shock when I found at ten to seven that the saved version of the TOK essay on my laptop was incomplete by a page and a half were still fresh in my mind. The clouds were grey and it was slightly chilly. I remembered the wind howling through the window of the bus as it hurtled towards school, while I desperately fought to type in the rest of my TOK essay from a hard copy that I’d found in one of my files. The laptop was thrown around quite a bit and typing was virtually impossible as we rode over the fissured tarmac. I never want to travel down this road again, I thought to myself.

I found a little black marble square in the floor of the portico where biscuits and juice are served at school. To my left and right were green plants contemplating silently in the corner. Everything was a little subdued as wisps of cotton wool of gloom hung in the air. Standing in my little black square, I began to read through the TOK essay. Out of the corner of my eye, I could still see that no one was coming into the little black square. Suddenly, for some strange reason, and for one I am at quite a loss to explain, I felt a little better. It was like I was in my own little black square. I could stand in it how I wanted and do in it what I wanted. I began walking in a circle in the black square and couldn’t help but smile a little, even though there wasn’t any conceivable reason to do so.

Looking back on the incident during lunch, I decided that appreciation of the small and childish things in life, something as simple as standing on the main portico floor and standing in the black square inlay, and knowing that they are different, can make one happy. These things appear at one like realisations sometimes, single lines from unfinished limericks, and can make a difficult situation so much more bearable!

The machine didn’t transmit nuances of expression.

A friend and I were talking the other day through the machine. I could hear something like her, and I believe I received something of her tone. I was satisfied…

Beneath those corridors of shining tiles were rooms, tier below tier, reaching far into the earth, and in each room there sat a human being, eating, or sleeping, or producing ideas.

He woke up in the morning and rushed to check if any comments had been left on his blog. He excitedly checked his e-mail to see if there was anything that had arrived since it was last checked before he went to sleep a few hours ago. There were a few advertisements. Digitally enhanced pictures of people smiling, sterile beaches and fully air-conditioned rooms. He was satisfied.

The blog, which contained ideas and discussions about the “philosophical thoughts” that had struck him, had no new comments. It made him unhappy. It upset him that there was nothing there yet, and the satisfaction of a few seconds ago dissipated. He began to rummage around for better and more interesting ideas to post up in the evening. It had to be interesting, it had to be attractive. It had to, above all, inspire comment.

There was the button that produced literature.

All through the day, he scrutinised for things to think. He put them in his blog in the evening. He arranged them in Times New Roman script in a mechanical size of 12, evenly spaced and ready to be presented for the ignition of other’s mind engines. He hit the submit button and the characters were transmitted by electric pulses to the central Machine from where it could be accessed by other human beings and their minds and machines.

The clumsy system of public gatherings had long since been abandoned; neither Vashti not her audience stirred from their rooms. Seated in her arm-chair she spoke, while they, in their arm-chairs heard her, fairly well, and saw her, fairly well.

On another side of the sphere rotating in melancholy silence in the vastness of space, uninspiringly, as she who stared at the white liquid crystal screens in her machine room thought, while the last buds of autumn gave way to white white white winter outside the unobserved window, sat the judge of his happiness. The ideas were proclaimed of mediocre quality. They was duly processed and considered. No comment was made. Another blog was switched to. Within the day, sixty-two blogs were read. Some were commented on, some were not.
“In certain directions human intercourse had advanced enormously.”

Similarly, he looked at the blog. The idea was of some interest but there simply wasn’t any time to comment. There were several other correspondences to be attended to. In a machine room another machine room somewhere between the neutrons and electrons of that atom that the blogger didn’t know, another blog was switched to.

“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.”

In the evening, he checked his blog again. There was no comment. “No matter,” he thought, hitting the refresh button over and over again, “it’s only a matter of time.” But deep down, where the plastic covering of his wiring met the copper conductor, where all was dark save for the humming, he was unhappy. He wanted his blog to be commented on. It was of no concern that he didn’t know the people who usually commented. It was no matter that he didn’t know their face, whether they were man or woman or child, or what they were reading or saying or tasting or ironing or walking or dressing or eating save for that which they chose to communicate in little electric pulses. It was of no concern that little shapes in regular patterns were all he knew of them who he ought to have concerned himself with only if they could be regarded as insignificant to his own life’s happiness. In the old days they would have been at atom’s worth of significance, a moth in an abandoned shed while the families played in the snow. Now they were sustenance.
The little bicycle stood outside the window, looking like a little grasshopper ready to eat a fresh green leaf. The man stayed at his machine.



The imponderable bloom, declared by a discredited philosophy to be the actual essence of intercourse, was rightly ignored by the Machine, just as the imponderable bloom of the grape was ignored by the manufacturers of artificial fruit.

“Read my blog,” said the friend as we ended our conversation.

“How we have advanced thanks to the Machine!”
“How we have advanced thanks to the Machine!” said Vashti.
“How we have advance thanks to the Machine!” echoed the passenger







Inspired by
E.M. Forster, The Machine Stops