I men­tioned Ger­ald Stan­ley Lee’s The Voice of the Machines in a pub con­ver­sa­tion a cou­ple of days back, and I see aware­ness of it start­ing to seep out through the del​.icio​.us net­work. From the time almost a year ago when Lee Spec­tor men­tioned the book, to when I had it in my hands and scanned it, and passed it through the machine of Dis­trib­uted Proof­read­ers and Bar­bara made it what you see today, I’ve won­dered what will come of it.

Let aware­ness of it spread. That will be a pleas­ant answer.

As I said months ago, but feel obliged to say again: go read it.

The truest def­i­n­i­tion of a gen­tle­man is that he is a man who loves his work. This is also the truest def­i­n­i­tion of a poet. The man who loves his work is a poet because he expresses delight in that work. He is a gen­tle­man because his delight in that work makes him his own employer. No mat­ter how many men are over him, or how many men pay him, or fail to pay him, he stands under the wide heaven the one man who is mas­ter of the earth. He is the one infal­li­bly over­paid man on it. The man who loves his work has the sin­gle thing the world affords that can make a man free, that can make him his own employer, that admits him to the ranks of gen­tle­men, that pays him, or is rich enough to pay him, what a gentleman’s work is worth.

The poets of the world are the men who pour their pas­sions into it, the men who make the world over with their pas­sions. Every­thing that these men touch, as with some strange and immor­tal joy from out of them, has the thrill of beauty in it, and exul­ta­tion and won­der. They can­not have it oth­er­wise even if they would. A true man is the auto­bi­og­ra­phy of some great delight mas­ter­ing his heart for him, pos­sess­ing his brain, mak­ing his hands beautiful.

Look­ing at the mat­ter in this way, in pro­por­tion to the num­ber employed there are more gen­tle­men run­ning loco­mo­tives to-​​day than there are teach­ing in col­leges. In pro­por­tion as we are more cre­ative in cre­at­ing machines at present than we are in cre­at­ing any­thing else there are more poets in the mechan­i­cal arts than there are in the fine arts; and while many of the men who are engaged in the machine-​​shops can hardly be said to be gen­tle­men (that is, they would rather be preach­ers or lawyers), these can be more than off­set by the much larger pro­por­tion of men in the fine arts, who, if they were gen­tle­men in the truest sense, would turn mechan­ics at once; that is, they would do the thing they were born to do, and they would respect that thing, and make every one else respect it.

While the def­i­n­i­tion of a poet and a gentleman—that he is a man who loves his work—might appear to make a new divi­sion of soci­ety, it is a divi­sion that already exists in the actual life of the world, and con­sti­tutes the only lit­eral aris­toc­racy the world has ever had.

It may be set down as a fun­da­men­tal prin­ci­ple that, no mat­ter how pro­saic a man may be, or how proud he is of hav­ing been born upon this planet with poetry all left out of him, it is the very essence of the most hard and prac­ti­cal man that, as regards the one upper­most thing in his life, the thing that reveals the power in him, he is a poet in spite of him­self, and whether he knows it or not.

So long as the thing a man works with is a part of an inner ideal to him, so long as he makes the thing he works with express that ideal, the heat and the glow and the lus­tre and the beauty and the uncon­quer­able­ness of that man, and of that man’s delight, shall be upon all that he does. It shall sing to heaven. It shall sing to all on earth who over­hear heaven.

Every man who loves his work, who gets his work and his ideal con­nected, who makes his work speak out the heart of him, is a poet. It makes lit­tle dif­fer­ence what he says about it. In pro­por­tion as he has power with a thing; in pro­por­tion as he makes the thing—be it a bit of color, or a frag­ment of fly­ing sound, or a word, or a wheel, or a throttle—in pro­por­tion as he makes the thing ful­fill or express what he wants it to ful­fill or express, he is a poet. All heaven and earth can­not make him otherwise.

That the inven­tor is in all essen­tial respects a poet toward the machine that he has made, it would be hard to deny. That, with all the appar­ent prose that piles itself about his machine, the machine is in all essen­tial respects a poem to him, who can ques­tion? Who has ever known an inven­tor, a man with a pas­sion in his hands, with­out feel­ing toward him as he feels toward a poet? Is it noth­ing to us to know that men are liv­ing now under the same sky with us, hun­dreds of them (their faces haunt us on the street), who would all but die, who are all but dying now, this very moment, to make a machine live,—martyrs of valves and wheels and of riv­ets and retorts, sleep­less, tire­less, uncon­quer­able men?

To know an inven­tor the moment of his triumph,—the moment when, work­ing his will before him, the machine at last, resist­less, silent, mas­sive pan­tomime of a life, offers itself to the gaze of men’s souls and the needs of their bodies,—to know an inven­tor at all is to know that at a moment like this a chord is touched in him strange and deep, soft as from out of all eter­nity. The melody that Homer knew, and that Dante knew, is his also, with the grime upon his hands, stand­ing and watch­ing it there. It is the same song that from pride to pride and joy to joy has been singing through the hearts of The Men Who Make, from the begin­ning of the world. The thing that was not, that now is, after all the pray­ing with his hands … iron and wood and rivet and cog and wheel—is it not more than these to him stand­ing before it there? It is the face of matter—who does not know it?—answering the face of the man, whis­per­ing to him out of the dust of the earth.

My empha­sis. Lee’s words.

“The face of mat­ter, whis­per­ing to him out of the dust of the earth.”

That is why we try, and keep try­ing, and are for­ever look­ing out at things and trans­form­ing them. Not just the mat­ter of the world on which we walk, but the mat­ter from which we our­selves are made and remade; the dust of insti­tu­tions, the bits of net­works, the lay­ers of com­mu­ni­ca­tion. For the sake of con­ver­sa­tion with the world, of mutual inter­ro­ga­tion. We whis­per to one another: the mak­ers, and the world that’s made.

Why the best of us remain pro­gram­mers, math­e­mati­cians, engi­neers, schol­ars, human­ists, neu­ro­sci­en­tists, edu­ca­tors, painters, game design­ers, world builders, crit­ics, moth­ers, biol­o­gists, cin­e­matog­ra­phers, or even politi­cians? Not for the com­pany of our own kind, or even the thrill of the work itself. It’s the sense that the world, whether shaped by or resist­ing our efforts, has given us a sign of approval, acknowl­edg­ment, acqui­es­cence.

Even the effect one man’s writ­ing can have on another… that’s an answer. That’s the echo of a life’s work.

Any result is an answer. The best of us lis­ten, and appre­ci­ate that the world has taken time to respond. The result­ing con­ver­sa­tion is, for the best of us, the most impor­tant Machine.