Stoke Newington, London, April 27, 2020
I keep reading stories about how the pandemic will revolutionize everything. How sectors of the economy will now shift to working from home; how universities will engage in e-learning; how restaurants will disappear and how sweat pants are the next office dress code. I read that rapper Travis Scott dropped a new song on the video game Fortnite. But between the lines, all I see is a couch where a tall woman with a mushroom-like white face sits.
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That woman is Vashti, the heroine in The Machine Stops. She has haunted me since I was 17. That book, written in 1909, tells a futuristic tale in which people live isolated well beneath the surface, each one in their own little room, communicating only via machine.
Even though Vashti lived alone, she got to know thousands of people through the machine and has dedicated her time to come up with various ideas in a variety of events through screens, which replaced the corporeal system of public gathering.
When her son asked her to meet face to face, Vashti is shocked by such a rude idea, because a direct meeting with people had become obsolete, a primitive and disgusting relic from an era when civilization could not understand the functions of the systems and used it to bring people to a thing rather than bring things to people.
That last sentence has reverberated in my head over the past week. It captures the essence of E. M. Forster's ability to show, through Vashti's vantage point, how the historical conditions that we have been born into shape our consciousness, how the modern perspective shapes our past as an early stage on an imaginary axis of progress.
When I first read the book as a teen, I had a Nokia cellphone the size of a small explosive device. The world that Foster had created was attractive because of its remote mysteriousness. Today, in an era of physical distancing, social media and food deliveries, the brilliant story that he created, which managed to foretell the technological developments of our time, creates a sense of claustrophobia.
Perhaps this is why I am afraid of becoming used to the new normal: maintaining two meters, recoiling from foreign objects, avoiding hugs, showing anxiety from surfaces; increased handwashing; gloves, masks, screens; and the hardening of borders between states, alongside a digital big band of webinars, online interviews, and virtual tours of closed museums.
Hunkering down in my home against my flickering screen, prevented from flying home, I sometimes feel that I am living in the exposition that leads to Forster's sterile world, as if I had found myself, without notice, in the glove compartment of a car racing on the freeway, its windows open and its radio blasting, toward Vashti, who is waiting for me with her white faces that have never seen the light of day, to give me my own room, well beneath the surface, with the most comfortable couch.
