With the Eyes Shut

With the Eyes Shut by Edward Bellamy

An unnamed narrator boards an express train and, resigned to boredom since he cannot read while riding, is approached by a train boy offering phonographed books that can be heard rather than read. He pays to listen to a novel through a two-pronged ear-trumpet device and is enthralled by the experience, finding the spoken narration more affecting than print. The train boy explains that the line will soon add phonographic guide-books that automatically narrate information about passing landscape, and a phonographic annunciator announces the approaching station in place of a brakeman's call. Arriving late, the narrator misses his friend Hamage, who was to meet him, and goes to a hotel. In the night he is startled awake by a woman's voice announcing the time, which proves to be a phonographic talking clock rather than a real visitor. In the morning the hotel clerk shows him how to use a phonographed letter from Hamage, explaining the device called "the indispensable," a small box everyone now carries. At breakfast he observes guests listening to correspondence with visible emotional reactions, and he himself works out how to operate a phonographed newspaper, choosing headings from a dial and using a "skipper" knob to speed through dull passages. Hamage arrives and takes him to Orton's, an establishment specializing in phonographic clocks. The manager explains the superiority of spoken time announcements over old-fashioned striking clocks and shows an array of clocks themed by religion, skepticism, philosophy, and literature, each voiced by effigies of their authors—including Talmage, Spurgeon, Storrs, Brooks, Ingersoll, Plato, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Rochefoucauld, Josh Billings, and Dickens. The cylinders can be swapped for new content. A lever lets the mechanism be switched off for sleepers, with a bedside button for convenience. Before leaving, they view a novelty device for church lobbies: a pump-handle apparatus that delivers the pastor's recorded welcome to visitors, with buttons for personal details like marital or parental status, reflecting that clergymen now serve many pulpits via phonograph. A similar device is being devised for the President's receptions, with buttons for different states and cities. Hurrying to the station, Hamage is reminded by his indispensable to buy storybooks for his children. He explains how the indispensable serves as a memory aid for engineers, businessmen, and spouses conveying messages, and the narrator wryly notes its implications for domestic authority. The narrator reflects on his own forgetfulness and the device's appeal for writers capturing night-time inspirations. At the bookstore, no printed books exist—only phonograph cylinders. Hamage distinguishes between inexpensive borrowed phonographs of current literature and purchased editions of permanent literary value, noting that different elocutionists' renderings offer real variety, as the narrator discovers trying several versions of Tennyson. He also experiences a phonographed Booth-Barrett "Othello," complete with a panorama of changing stage pictures synchronized to the dialogue, finding it superior to attending an actual play. Hamage buys phonographed fairy stories and a children's indispensable, remarking how phonographs let mothers manage children remotely, with Patti's recorded voice singing babies to sleep. The narrator jokes about boys deliberately losing or breaking their indispensables. Discussing the decline of printers, Hamage explains that reading and writing are becoming rare skills, with schools expected to phase them out in favor of phonetic shorthand, though scholars will still need print for older, unphonographed literature. Children are now taught, examined, and recite via phonographs. Hamage notes that opticians have declined as eyestrain diminishes, while physiologists predict improved posture and physique from the end of sedentary reading. The narrator observes that deafness, once less isolating than blindness regarding books, is now the greater handicap, though Hamage mentions intensifier improvements and printed books prepared for the stone-deaf. They proceed to the phonographing department, where Hamage explains that plays and sermons are recorded live or re-delivered by their authors, while most books are phonographed by professional elocutionists. They meet Playwell, an elocutionist whose popularity lets him command high fees, who describes studying a manuscript for days or weeks before rendering it, dictated originally to a phonograph by the author. Hamage then hurries the narrator to catch the last train out of town. The narrator recalls nothing of the subsequent trip, waking from a nap to find the train stopped and Hamage already gone.

By Edward Bellamy · First published 1897 · Genre: Romance, Historical Fiction, Realistic Fiction · 7,630 words

First lines

RAILROAD rides are naturally tiresome to persons who cannot read on the cars, and, being one of those unfortunates, I resigned myself, on taking my seat in the train, to several hours of tedium, alleviated only by such cat-naps as I might achieve. Partly on account of my infirmity, though more on account of a taste for rural quiet and retirement, my railroad journeys are few and far between. Strange as the statement may seem in days like these, it had actually been five years since I had been on an express train of a trunk line. Now, as every one knows, the improvements in the conveniences of the best equipped trains have in that period been very great, and for a considerable time I found myself amply entertained in taking note first of one ingenious device and then of another, and wondering what would come next. At the end of the first hour, however, I was pleased to find that I was growing comfortably drowsy, and proceeded to compose myself for a nap, which I hoped might last to my destination.

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dystopia · utopia · socialism · political fiction · 19th century · American literature · visionary · reform · economic theory · future society · idealism · critique of capitalism

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With the Eyes Shut is listed on Textopian as a novel by Edward Bellamy, dated 1897 CE.

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