How Comfortable Are We?

Sentence Analysis of The Machine Stops

“Dawn, midday, twilight, the zodiacal path, touched neither men’s lives not their hearts, and science retreated into the ground, to concentrate herself upon the problems that she was certain of solving.” (Forester, 59)

“Men seldom moved their bodies; all unrest was concentrated in the soul.” (Forester, 57)

Both of these sentences reflect on a big part of the society that Forester describes in The Machine Stops, which is that people have gotten rid of practically all discomfort in their lives. I think one theme of this story is that while we complain about discomfort now and are always seeking ways to alleviate it. If we actually had a society where there was no discomfort, we would rapidly decline as a human race. Part of what makes us so successful is our ability to endure discomfort and grow through it.

I think part of what we often associate with discomfort is change, including changing temperatures, emotions, and routines. In this world of comfort, there is hardly any change happening and because of that there is a loss of creativity and the ability to adapt. This is reflected in this society’s scientific advances (or lack of). At the end of the first sentence I selected, Forester is describing to the reader what science has become. I find it interesting that Forester notes in this sentence that science has “retreated into the ground”, but Vashti doesn’t seem to recognize this and believes that she is participating in science even through concentrating “herself upon the problems that she was certain of solving”. I think her inability to take risks in science, and face possible disappointment or failure reflects how comfortable this society has become, and how badly that ends up hurting them. The only way that we can make scientific advances (or advances in any other area) is by taking risks, which can be uncomfortable, but Forester shows us what happens if we aren’t willing to be vulnerable and take those risks. This example ties back to his theme of the positive and necessary effects of being uncomfortable in our daily lives, even when it is easier to stay where we are.

In the first half of this first sentence, Forester is describing how this society has been set up in a way that the natural changes of the earth (sun, rotations of the earth, seasons, etc.) don’t affect people at all. I find it interesting that he specifies that these things, “touched neither men’s lives nor their hearts”. It seems that this specification shows just how far away from the natural world they are, and to what extremes they have gone to be comfortable. This goes back to his theme that we can never truly achieve perfect comfort, even if we go to the extent of completely blocking ourselves off from the natural world and completely relying on technology.

Another sentence that I thought demonstrated Forester’s theme of the necessity of discomfort is the second sentence I have listed. Adding on to his social commentary that we are constantly looking to become more comfortable, he makes the point in this sentence that even if we create a system of seemingly complete comfort, there will never be a point of absolute perfect contentment. In this sentence he describes how this society has changed so much about their world that none of them are at all affected by physical discomfort, but there is still more that makes them uncomfortable, and there is no way for them to completely alleviate this. It seems that in this theoretical society, there is even more “unrest…in the soul”, because there is no physical discomfort to distract from this discontent in their minds. This sentence is worded in a way that seems to be unbiased, just describing the fact of the matter, which helps Forester get his point across even more clearly. Because the reader can see that he isn’t writing in a way that is meant to persuade us to either side at this point, we are more likely to feel strongly that this way of life is unhealthy based on our own observation and opinion. I find it interesting that Forester describes all of this unrest as being “concentrated in the soul”. He could have said it was concentrated in the mind, the heart, or any number of other things, but he uses the word soul, which is generally used to describe something that is a product of the mind, the heart, and spiritual beliefs. The use of this word seems to tie this sentence back to the idea that the Machine has become such a big part of these peoples’ lives that they worship it. Their only discomfort that the Machine cannot ease is the discomfort of their humanness, including knowledge of wrong and right, as well as a probable gut feeling that there is something wrong with the way they are living.