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The Human Machine by Arnold Bennett
page 5 of 72 (06%)
sure too soon. Then the whole business starts again. They do not give
up--that particular wreck was, of course, due to a mere oversight; the
whole business starts again. For they have glimpsed perfection; they
have the gleam of perfection in their souls. Thus their lives run away.
'They will never fly!' you remark, cynically. Well, if they don't?
Besides, what about Wright? With all your cynicism, have you never
envied them their machine and their passionate interest in it?

You know, perhaps, the moment when, brushing in front of the glass, you
detected your first grey hair. You stopped brushing; then you resumed
brushing, hastily; you pretended not to be shocked, but you were.
Perhaps you know a more disturbing moment than that, the moment when it
suddenly occurred to you that you had 'arrived' as far as you ever will
arrive; and you had realised as much of your early dream as you ever
will realise, and the realisation was utterly unlike the dream; the
marriage was excessively prosaic and eternal, not at all what you
expected it to be; and your illusions were dissipated; and games and
hobbies had an unpleasant core of tedium and futility; and the ideal
tobacco-mixture did not exist; and one literary masterpiece resembled
another; and all the days that are to come will more or less resemble
the present day, until you die; and in an illuminating flash you
understood what all those people were driving at when they wrote such
unconscionably long letters to the _Telegraph_ as to life being worth
living or not worth living; and there was naught to be done but face the
grey, monotonous future, and pretend to be cheerful with the worm of
_ennui_ gnawing at your heart! In a word, the moment when it occurred to
you that yours is 'the common lot.' In that moment have you not
wished--do you not continually wish--for an exhaustless machine, a
machine that you could never get to the end of? Would you not give your
head to be lying on the flat of your back, peering with a candle, dirty,
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