eautiful and glorious
interpretation of machinery for our modern life--there cannot be
poetry in anything in modern life. Either the machine is the door of
the future, or it stands and mocks at us where the door ought to be.
If we who have made machines cannot make our machines mean something,
we ourselves are meaningless, the great blue-and-gold machine above
our lives is meaningless, the winds that blow down upon us from it are
empty winds, and the lights that lure us in it are pictures of
darkness. There is one question that confronts and undergirds our
whole modern civilization. All other questions are a part of it. Can a
Machine Age have a soul?

If we can find a great hope and a great meaning for the machine-idea
in its simplest form, for machinery itself--that is, the machines of
steel and flame that minister to us--it will be possible to find a
great hope for our other machines. If we cannot use the machines we
have already mastered to hope with, the less we hope from our other
machines--our spirit-machines, the machines we have not mastered--the
better. In taking the stand that there is poetry in machinery, that
inspiring ideas and emotions can be and will be connected with
machinery, we are taking a stand for the continued existence of modern
religion--(in all reverence) the God-machine; for modern
education--the man-machine; for modern government--the crowd-machine;
for modern art--the machine in which the crowd lives.

If inspiring ideas cannot be connected with a machine simply because
it is a machine, there is not going to be anything left in this modern
world to connect inspiring ideas with.

Johnstown haunts me--the very memory of it. Flame and vapor and
shadow--like some huge, dim face of Labor, it lifts itself dumbly and
looks at me. I suppose, to some it is but a wraith of rusty vapor, a
mist of old iron, sparks floating from a chimney, while a train sweeps
past. But to me, with its spires of smoke and its towers of fire, it
is as if a great door had been opened and I had watched a god, down in
the wonder of real things--in the act of making an earth. I am filled
with childhood--and a kind of strange, happy terror. I struggle to
wonder my way out. Thousands of railways--after this--bind Johnstown
to me; miles of high, narrow, steel-built streets--the whole world
lifting itself mightily up, rolling itself along, turning itself over
on a great steel pivot, down in Pennsylvania--for its days and night