One is a call to unite the opposing elements within each person-what Margaret calls the beast and the monk, the prose and the passion-while the other is a call to put the greatest energy into personal relations.
Margaret Schlegel-the older of the two cultivated, well-to-do sisters central to the story-becomes impassioned over the phrase "Only connect!" which carries two meanings. They raise all sorts of questions about relationships, community, and sexuality-the very same questions that Forster was contemplating in these two works.įor those who have never read Howards End (or missed Emma Thompson in the 1992 film version), it is a book about human connection. At the century's beginning the telephone was new and the computer not even invented, yet Forster anticipated their modern evolution, perhaps most explicitly with his short story "The Machine Stops." Today the Internet and its related technologies are as ubiquitous as the automobile, within easy reach even as I fly five miles up.
Although he was not alone in despising the stink of gasoline and the frantic pace of vehicles, Forster had an unusual grasp of how technological advance promised to change social interaction-often for the worse.įorster also had an uncanny ability to predict exactly how technology would develop. The rows of parked airplanes and automobiles make a fitting backdrop: In the period when Forster wrote Howards End, 1908 to 1910, he was already decrying the filthy, cluttered underside of life in the motorized age. Forster's Howards End to gaze at the concrete sprawl of airport momentarily filling my window. A s my jetliner rears back, I look up from E.M.
0 kommentar(er)
