 CHAPTER 1 TAKING ONE SELF FOR GRANTED There are men who are capable of loving a machine more deeply than they can love a woman. They are among the happiest men on earth. This is not a sneer, meanly shot from cover at women. It is simply a statement of notorious fact. Men who worry themselves to distraction over the perfecting of a machine are indubitably blessed beyond their kind. Most of us have known such men. Yesterday they were constructing motor-cars, but today aeroplanes are in the air, or at any rate they ought to be, according to the inventors. Watch the inventors. Invention is not usually their principal business. They must invent in their spare time. They must invent before breakfast. Invent in the strand between liances and the office. Invent after dinner. Invent on Sundays. See with what ardour they rush home of a night. See how they seize a half-holiday like hungry dogs a bone. They don't want golf, bridge, limericks, novels, illustrated magazines, clubs, whisky, starting prices, hints about neckties, political meetings, yarns, comic songs, and turic salts, nor the smiles that situate between a gay corsage and a picture hat. They never wonder at a loss what they will do next. Their evenings never drag are always too short. You may indeed catch them at twelve o'clock at night on the flat of their backs, but not in bed, no, in a shed under a machine, holding a candle whose paths drop fatness up to the connecting rod that is strained or the wheel that is out of centre. They are continually interested. They enthralled. They have a machine, and they are perfecting it. They get one part right, and then another goes wrong, and they get that right, and then another goes wrong, and so on. Then they are quite sure they have reached perfection, forth issues the machine out of the shed, and in five minutes is smashed up, together with a limb or so of the inventors, just because they had been quite 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 right? 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 undest- Sample complete. Ready to continue?