Reading how Samuel Butler, in Erewhon, describes the inhabitant of that country who wrote The Book of Machines, and who thereby caused almost all the machines of his country to be set aside, has brought to mind the tale a friend told me of his journey to Mechanopolis, the city of machines. When he told me, he was still trembling at the memory of what he had seen, and it caused such a strong impression on him that he later retired to spend years in an isolated spot equipped with as few machines as possible. I will try to reproduce my friend’s story, as far as I can in his own words:
A time came when I found myself lost in the middle of a trackless desert: my companions had either turned back to try to save themselves, as if we knew where salvation was to be found, or had perished from thirst. I was alone, and almost dead from thirst myself. I sucked at the dark black blood that flowed from the fingers that I had torn in scrabbling at the dry ground in the mad hope of finding some water beneath it. I was almost prepared to lie down on the ground and turn up my eyes to the implacably blue sky in order to die as soon as possible. When I was prepared to try to kill myself by holding my breath or by scraping out a shallow grave to bury myself in that terrible earth, I lifted my failing eyes and thought I saw a patch of greenery in the distance. “It must be a mirage,” I thought, but I dragged myself toward it.
After several hours of agony, I did indeed find myself in an oasis. A spring of fresh water helped me regain my strength, and after drinking I ate some of the pleasant-tasting and succulent fruits that hung plentifully on the trees. Then I fell to sleep.
I do not know how many hours I slept, or whether they were indeed hours rather than days, or months, or years. All I know is that I awoke changed, changed utterly. My horrible sufferings had erased themselves almost completely from my memory. “Poor fellows!” I thought, as I remembered my companions in the expedition who had died en route. I stood up, drank water and ate fruit once again, and began to explore the oasis. And nearby, only a few steps from where I was, I found myself at a train station, entirely abandoned. There was not a soul to be seen. A train, deserted, with no driver or stoker, was steaming on the rails. The thought occurred to me that I should, out of pure curiosity, climb on board one of the cars. I sat down, closed the door behind me—I do not know why—and the train started to move. I felt a mad terror overcome me and was seized by the urge to throw myself from the window. But I contained myself, saying, “Let’s see where this ends up.”
The train moved so swiftly that I was unable even to take notice of the landscape through which we passed. I had to close the windows. I felt a horrid vertigo. And when the train finally stopped, I found myself in a magnificent station, far above any that we have here. I alighted and went into the streets.
I cannot describe the city. No human mind can even dream of the magnificence, the lavishness, the comfort, or the cleanliness of such a spot. Indeed, I did not understand the necessity for such cleanliness, as I saw not a single living creature. No people, no animals. Not a single dog crossing the street, not a single swallow in the sky.
I saw a splendid building whose sign read “Hotel,” just like that, written as we write it ourselves, and I went in. It was entirely deserted. I went to the dining room. There was an extremely substantial dinner available there. A list lay upon the table, and each dish on the list was given its number, and next to the list was a vast array of numbered buttons. All one had to do was touch a button and the dish that you desired came up from beneath the table.
After having eaten I went out into the street. Trams and cars drove past, all of them entirely empty.
All one had to do was approach and wave one’s hand and they would stop. I got into a car and allowed myself to be carried through the streets. I went to a magnificent geological park, with all the different types of land displayed with explanations on cards at their side. The explanation was given in Spanish, but written in a phonetic transcription. I left the park; I saw a tram passing with “Museum” on its front, and I took it. All the most famous paintings were in the museum, in their original versions. I became convinced that all the paintings we have in our cities, in our art galleries, are nothing more than extremely competent copies. At the foot of each painting there was a learned explanation of its historical and aesthetic value, written most calmly and carefully. In half an hour there, I learned more about painting than in twelve years of study here. I saw on a placard at the entrance that in Mechanopolis the Art Museum is considered a part of the Museum of Paleontology. It existed in order to study the products of the human race that had lived on this earth before the machines had supplanted them. The concert hall and the libraries, with which the city was filled, were also a part of the paleontological culture of the citizens of Mechanopolis, whoever they had been.
What more did I see? I went to the chief concert hall, where the instruments played by themselves. I was in the Grand Theater. In a cinema with phonographic accompaniment, designed in such a way as to give an absolute illusion of life. But my soul shrank to think that I was the only spectator. Where were the citizens of Mechanopolis?
When I woke up the next morning in my hotel room I found, on my bedside table, the Mechanopolis Echo, with news stories from all over the world received via wireless telegraph. And on the last page I read the following: “Yesterday afternoon, by what means we are uncertain, there arrived in our city a man, one of the few poor fellows still left around here, and we predict he will have a rough time of it.”
And it was true that my days started to become a torment to me. My loneliness began to be filled with ghosts. That is the worst thing about loneliness, how easily it becomes filled. I began to believe that all these factories, all these objects, were controlled by souls that were invincible, intangible, and silent. I started to believe that this city was peopled with persons such as myself, and that they came and went without my seeing them or hearing myself strike against them. I felt that I was the victim of a terrible illness, a madness. The invisible world that filled the human loneliness of Mechanopolis became a crucifying nightmare to me. I started to give voices to the machines, to scold them, to beg things of them. I even went so far as to fall to my knees in front of a car, asking it for mercy. Almost ready to throw myself down to the ground and despair, I took up the newspaper in agitation just to see how things were in the world of men, and found myself face-to-face with this article: “As we predicted, the poor fellow who came, by what means we are uncertain, into the incomparable city of Mechanopolis is going mad. His spirit, filled with ancestral worries and superstitions with regard to the invisible world, is unable to cope with the spectacle of progress. We pity him.”
I could not resist the compassion of the mysterious invincible creatures, whether angels or demons, whom I believed to inhabit Mechanopolis. But then I was stricken by a terrible idea, the idea that the machines themselves had souls, mechanical souls, and that it was the machines themselves who felt pity for me. This idea made me tremble. I thought that now I was face-to-face with the race that dominated the dehumanized earth.
I rushed out like a madman and threw myself in front of the first electric tram that passed by. When I awoke from the blow I found myself once again in the oasis I had left behind. I started walking and came across the tent of some Bedouin, and when I met one of them, I embraced him in tears. How well we understood one another even without words! They gave me food, they cared for me, and at night I went out with them and, stretched out on the ground, looking up at the stars, we prayed together. There was not a single machine to be found nearby.
And ever since then I have developed a true hatred of what we choose to call progress, and even of culture itself, and I look everywhere for someone who is like me, a man like me, who laughs and cries just as I cry and laugh, and a place where there are no machines and where the days flow by with the same sweet Christian meekness as an undiscovered river flows through the virgin forest.