Читать книгу The Book of Safety - Yasser Abdel Hafez - Страница 7

“Select what you consider to be the correct answer, making sure to dictate your response to the clerk. Please do not write anything yourself. There’s no need. The pen and paper in front of you are for jotting down anything not immediately relevant to the subject at hand but which you consider crucial and would like to return to later.

“Here, you may enjoy your confession. You might care to take a stroll around the room to let your thoughts flow calmly out—that’s right, like those clichéd scenes that doubtless find an echo in your memory: one man muses, another writes. Between friends, let me assure you that this one is a quite excellent machine, his handwriting neat and more than capable of keeping up with you, no matter how pushed for pace. He doesn’t stall. Try him out, you won’t regret it. Don’t be shy. It’s no fault of yours that this is his job. My dear fellow, doing what we were made for comes easy to us all. I mean, do you despise the miner for coming out of the ground all caked in black?”

No answer.

“Ah well, fair enough. You’ve never seen a miner. Nor have I. My apologies, the image is a little too ‘of-the-West.’ Are there no mines in the East? Just imagine, it had never occurred to me before now! But surely you get the point. Come, let’s not waste time with any more metaphors; what I’m saying is that my assistant here is at your service and will remain so until mankind invents a reliable automated transcriber. They’re almost there, I believe, but—and let me be frank with you, even at the risk of you thinking me a traditionalist—what a hateful innovation that would be! Wouldn’t you agree with me that the further science progresses the further we move from a human communion? Do you not sense, even in your current situation (and I sincerely hope you feel in no way constrained), the human warmth that binds we three together in this room? Now, imagine if that third fellow were nothing more than a machine—a machine that never erred, that carried out its instructions with matchless fidelity. We would feel reassured, certainly, because neither my questions nor your answers would be meddled with. No worries there. But how did fellow feeling become civilization other than through a muddle of error and coincidence?”