The Machine Will Never Triumph, part eight

The Cities

City-Life

            When I see the great cities—

When I am in a great city, I know that I despair.
I know there is no hope for us, death waits, it is useless to
    care.

For oh the poor people, that are flesh of my flesh,
I, that am flesh of their flesh,
when I see the iron hooked into their faces
their poor, their fearful faces
I scream in my soul, for I know I cannot
take the iron hook out of their faces, that makes them so
    drawn,
nor cut the invisible wires of steel that pull them
back and forth, to work,
back and forth, to work,
like fearful and corpse-like fishes hooked and being played
by some malignant fisherman on an unseen shore
where he does not choose to land them yet, hooked fishes
    of the factory world.¹

The world is becoming more overpopulated every day, and along with the population explosion, we are witnessing both the movement of people from the countryside to cities and the urbanization of suburbs into cities. Life is supposed to be grand and beautiful, filled with ample silence and time for contemplation, but city life is debased, rushed, and lacking in joie de vivre. The countryside is polluted and is largely used as a base for megacorporations to grow genetically modified, chemical ridden, tasteless crops, but the cities are a vile mass of putrefaction. There is no clean air, no clean water, and no silence (for a magisterial treatment of silence, please see Max Picard’s The World of Silence) in a city. If an innocent child with no conception of Hell were to ask what Hell is like, one could do no better than to send the child to a city. A city today may have fewer fiery furnaces than a hundred years ago, but the canaille that inhabit the cities are more robotic than ever. Lawrence despaired for the city-masses, for they were born of the same humanity that he was, but while he escaped the Machine, most people are caught like fish in a net, hooked and bleeding; going back and forth to their slavery—their work—day after day, leading meaningless lives, no more, no less than robots.