scr Re: doesn't have the morlocks

["Magnus Huckvale" <magnus@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello.

> For those of you who haven't read The Time Machine - the Eloi were
> beautiful creatures who lived above ground and basically had a grand old
> time whilst the Morlocks were ugly and lived below ground in mines and
> worked hard. The Traveller (the protagonist of the book) eventually
> discovers however that the Eloi are not the superior race but are
> actually kept as food by the Morlocks.

Surely 'superior' here is an inappropriate value judgement, particularly in
the context of the book.

To quote the late DNA
"man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because
he had achieved so much - the wheel, New York, wars and so on - whilst all
the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time.
But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more
intelligent than man - for precisely the same reasons."


> Essentially what I said was that some people were Morlocks and some were
> Elois. I just used those words because they sounded right and because
> they sort of convery what I was getting at but what I really meant was
> that there are some people who are creative - who seem to have a knack
> of making things look 'nice', for want of a better word. And there are
> some of us who don't.

But this is exactly the sort of view that the Morlocks and Elois would have
themselves without The Traveller's perspective.

Real-world Morlocks see their lives as the cave in which they have to work
like slaves, never really achieving any ultimate goal because they don't
know what it is.  They just dig bigger and bigger holes.

Elois on the other hand may do the occasional spot of Morlock-like work but
in general they live in a land of milk and honey, being carefree and gaily
exploring their creative sides.


> Some people just seem to have a knack of creating something beautiful -
> whether that's how they arrange their house or draw or take a photograph
> or whatever there's some inbuilt thing that infuses the creation with a
> certain je ne sais quoi.

But everyone has their inner Elois, some of us feel too trapped in the
Morlock's cave to explore it.

That was the point I wanted to make anyway.  Here are some further random
comments.



>
http://london.pm.org/nx_meetings/2000_may/jpeg-mac-gamma/2small/b3000504-03%
5Bjbcd2-IMG_003-londonpm%5D0256.jpeg

Fantastic use of depth of field.

> I'm a deep person, no, really,

Yes.  Stop it.  Superficial is much easier.

> This is an incoherent mumbling and I'm not really sure if I've got the
> point across. Eloi and Morlocks was a bad, nay terrible, metaphor but it
> just kind of stuck :)

I'm not exactly sure what it was all about in the first place.  I thought it
was a silly movie and didn't bother reading the book.  I quite liked it when
HG Wells turned up in his time machine on Lois & Clark: The New Adventures
of Superman, but that's beside the point.

Magnus