{"id":"01KG6GMNQW61GQ2RNBMMXDNJRY","cid":"bafkreibm2jilf3g32oge5zzbgwm5aapbum2d3w5wqejryr76zbimhd55ja","type":"chunk","properties":{"end_line":8087,"extracted_at":"2026-01-30T03:55:03.883Z","extracted_by":"structure-extraction-lambda","label":"Chunk 8","source_file":"01KG6FXSCNX5F3D880P3YP3PKR","start_line":8011,"text":"one might experience at the fulfilment of some mysterious prophecy. But\r\nhow absurd, thought I again; the thing is a mere machine, the essence of\r\nwhich is unvarying punctuality and precision.\r\n\r\nPreviously absorbed by the wheels and cylinders, my attention was now\r\ndirected to a sad-looking woman standing by.\r\n\r\n‘That is rather an elderly person so silently tending the machine-end\r\nhere. She would not seem wholly used to it either.’\r\n\r\n‘Oh,’ knowingly whispered Cupid, through the din, ‘she only came last\r\nweek. She was a nurse formerly. But the business is poor in these parts,\r\nand she’s left it. But look at the paper she is piling there.’\r\n\r\n‘Ay, foolscap,’ handling the piles of moist, warm sheets, which\r\ncontinually were being delivered into the woman’s waiting hands. ‘Don’t\r\nyou turn out anything but foolscap at this machine?’\r\n\r\n‘Oh, sometimes, but not often, we turn out finer work--cream-laid and\r\nroyal sheets, we call them. But foolscap being in chief demand, we turn\r\nout foolscap most.’\r\n\r\nIt was very curious. Looking at that blank paper continually dropping,\r\ndropping, dropping, my mind ran on in wonderings of those strange uses\r\nto which those thousand sheets eventually would be put. All sorts of\r\nwritings would be writ on those now vacant things--sermons, lawyers’\r\nbriefs, physicians’ prescriptions, love-letters, marriage certificates,\r\nbills of divorce, registers of births, death-warrants, and so on,\r\nwithout end. Then, recurring back to them as they here lay all blank, I\r\ncould not but bethink me of that celebrated comparison of John Locke,\r\nwho, in demonstration of his theory that man had no innate ideas,\r\ncompared the human mind at birth to a sheet of blank paper; something\r\ndestined to be scribbled on, but what sort of characters no soul might\r\ntell.\r\n\r\nPacing slowly to and fro along the involved machine, still humming with\r\nits play, I was struck as well by the inevitability as the\r\nevolvement-power in all its motions.\r\n\r\n‘Does that thin cobweb there,’ said I, pointing to the sheet in its more\r\nimperfect stage, ‘does that never tear or break? It is marvellous\r\nfragile, and yet this machine it passes through is so mighty.’\r\n\r\n‘It never is known to tear a hair’s point.’\r\n\r\n‘Does it never stop--get clogged?’\r\n\r\n‘No. It _must_ go. The machinery makes it go just _so_; just that very\r\nway, and at that very pace you there plainly _see_ it go. The pulp can’t\r\nhelp going.’\r\n\r\nSomething of awe now stole over me, as I gazed upon this inflexible iron\r\nanimal. Always, more or less, machinery of this ponderous, elaborate\r\nsort strikes, in some moods, strange dread into the human heart, as some\r\nliving, panting Behemoth might. But what made the thing I saw so\r\nspecially terrible to me was the metallic necessity, the unbudging\r\nfatality which governed it. Though, here and there, I could not follow\r\nthe thin, gauzy veil of pulp in the course of its more mysterious or\r\nentirely invisible advance, yet it was indubitable that, at those points\r\nwhere it eluded me, it still marched on in unvarying docility to the\r\nautocratic cunning of the machine. A fascination fastened on me. I stood\r\nspellbound and wandering in my soul. Before my eyes--there, passing in\r\nslow procession along the wheeling cylinders, I seemed to see, glued to\r\nthe pallid incipience of the pulp, the yet more pallid faces of all the\r\npallid girls I had eyed that heavy day. Slowly, mournfully,\r\nbeseechingly, yet unresistingly, they gleamed along, their agony dimly\r\noutlined on the imperfect paper, like the print of the tormented face on\r\nthe handkerchief of Saint Veronica.\r\n\r\n‘Halloa! the heat of the room is too much for you,’ cried Cupid, staring\r\nat me.\r\n\r\n‘No--I am rather chill, if anything.’\r\n\r\n‘Come out, sir--out--out,’ and, with the protecting air of a careful\r\nfather, the precocious lad hurried me outside.\r\n\r","title":"Chunk 8"},"relationships":[{"peer":"01KG6GKYHXFMHC1JHVXJAQ6BXT","peer_type":"section","predicate":"in"},{"peer":"01KG6FXSCNX5F3D880P3YP3PKR","peer_type":"file","predicate":"extractedFrom"},{"peer":"01KG2T49K0H5GDRB0G4YDTPG8H","peer_type":"collection","predicate":"collection"},{"peer":"01KG6GMNQWB15R8ZST0RX6P5MG","peer_type":"chunk","predicate":"prev"},{"peer":"01KG6GMNQWK3XY67FAEVKJY4H0","peer_type":"chunk","predicate":"next"}],"ver":2,"created_at":"2026-01-30T03:55:07.388Z","ts":"2026-01-30T03:55:19.074Z","edited_by":{"method":"manual","user_id":"01KFF0H3YRP9ZSM033AM0QJ47H"}}