[Ea]

To return to - if not completely to 'The machine stops', but at least to Forster and the issue of freedom, I have a quote from Forster's 'Maurice' - thoughts by Maurice towards the end of the book where he/Forster ponders freedom and the lack of it:

"His new vigour persisted next morning, when he returned to work. Before his failure with Lasker Jones [tried to cure himself of homosexuality] he had looked forward to work as a privilege of which he was almost unworthy. It was to have rehabilitated him, so that he could hold up his head at home. But now it too crumbled, and again he wanted to laugh, and wondered why he had been taken in so long. The clientele of Messrs Hill and Hall [a stock-broker firm where our protagonist work] was drawn from the middle-middle classes, whose highest desire seemed shelter — continuous shelter — not a lair in the darkness to be reached against fear, but shelter everywhere and always, until the existence of earth and sky is forgotten, shelter from poverty and disease and violence and impoliteness; and consequently from joy; God slipped this retribution in. He saw from their faces, as from the faces of his clerks and his partners, that they had never known real joy. Society had catered for them too completely. They had never struggled, and only a struggle twists sentimentality and lust together into love. ..."