Homo Faber

The Machine Will Never Triumph, part twenty-one

Bowls

Take away all this crystal and silver
and give me soft-skinned wood
that lives erect through long nights, physically
to put to my lips.¹

All the objects we surround ourselves with, especially those objects that are made by machines in factories, drain the life out of us. The best thing of all is to have as little as possible, and only those things that are either necessary or beautiful. For the necessary things in life, they should, ideally, be hand-made, beautiful, made to last, and be made out of a natural material. Wood is preferable to metal, which is far preferable to plastic. A wooden cup or spoon has much more life in it than its glass or metal counterpart, and if made ethically, from downed wood, it is harm-free and transmits the life of the tree to a person. But now, we surround ourselves with too many things, and the things we surround ourselves with are ugly. Lawrence makes this clear:

It was as if dismalness had soaked through and through everything. The utter negation of natural beauty, the utter negation of the gladness of life, the utter absence of the instinct for shapely beauty which every bird and beast has, the utter death of the human intuitive faculty was appalling. The stacks of soap in the grocers’ shops, the rhubarb and lemons in the greengrocers! the awful hats in the milliners! all went by ugly, ugly, ugly, followed by the plaster-and-gilt horror of the cinema with its wet picture announcements[…] What could possibly become of such a people, a people in whom the living intuitive faculty was dead as nails, and only queer mechanical yells and uncanny will-power remained?²

There was still hope for the generations that created the first machines, since they still knew natural beauty, but for most in the modern world, beauty and nature are simply abstract concepts with no meaning. Now, healing the world is doubly difficult, because many young people don’t even know the basic concepts we are talking about. It is difficult to speak of the superiority of long-hand, cursive, writing when many children are only taught to print, and that quickly. Simple changes can change the world. Writing with a pencil rather than a keyboard, knitting and darning one’s own socks, etc. might not sound like earth shattering changes but if everyone stopped buying and started living simply, the world could heal. It is time to realize that smaller is more beautiful, or as Lawrence writes: