“A great city is a great solitude.”
He wanted the city to be silent. He wanted the people no longer to talk but to communicate through an elaborate system of written messages. These would be rolled up & placed in small wooden cylinders, that would be propelled with compressed air along pipes, shooting the message off to wherever and whomever it was meant.
Apart from the sheer mechanickal impossibility of such a scheme, it was respectfully pointed out to the Commandant, as he sat alone on the bare flagstone floor of his darkened cell, that it was no likely that people in the future would want to live in a world where they could only communicate through such sterile means, never to see or meet each other.
‘Speech was given to man to conceal thought,’ the Commandant said, his own speech now almost entirely reduced to the poverty of such endless aphorisms, & some said his mask was seen to smile in the dim light of his prison cell, his feathered epaulettes to flap as he spoke.
{Richard Flanagan, Gould’s Book of Fish}
Photo by S.
