Reflection to A. Huxley's Time and the Machine

La Salle College Antipolo[pic 1]

Tertiary Education Unit

Education Department

Fuentes, Charles David M.                                English-American Literature

3-BEEN                                                        February 16, 2017

Time and the Machine by Aldous Huxley:

A Literary Analysis

Throughout the history, man was able to transform the world he knows into his own comfort zone. He was able to transform his primitive life into a comfortable life he dubbed as “smart living.” It cannot be denied that man, as a rational animal has succeeded in using his intelligence to turn the paradigms of the world he knows –the survival of the fittest and natural selection –into a world created for his satisfaction and wit.

In this essay by Huxley, he stressed the changes brought by industrialism and urbanism to the human psyche and his orientation towards time. He posited that as soon as machines were built and was put into working, man was shackled in the idea that time should be chased. They began setting up targets based on a given calendar. They started to be conscious about the train schedule, their work hours, their travel time and anything related to time. However, the time Huxley was pointing at is the time created by man just the same as the machines functioning in the factories and streets. The concept of time which makes his world turns around. This concept of time puts every one of us in a hurry to the extent of forgetting the primary reason why we are doing things for our life. It makes us blind and unconscious of different things. We became too indulged in counting the time we are spending.

Upon reading it, Huxley’s argument simply focuses on one thing. That as we progress in life whether economically of emotionally, our simple perception of the small things –in this case, time –are being sacrificed for the sake of prosperity and advancements. We tend to forget the essence why we are working in the first place, not to count the time we spent and equate to wages we are expecting every 15th or 30th but because we are working for the betterment of ourselves. Huxley’s argument can still be applied in today’s society. We are all into the advancement of technology that we tend to disconnect ourselves in the more sensible physical world. If industrialization brought a change in our perception of time, then Cyber revolution changes the world we know as we perceive it. It might not be about ‘time’ that we are concerned now, but our disconnection to the world brought by the things we ourselves gave existence to is what we should be concerned of.