Read "The Strike" by Pablo Neruda online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
The idle factory came to seem strange.
A silence in the plant, a distance between machine and man, as if a thread had been cut between two planets, an absence of human hands that use up time making things, and the naked rooms without work and without noise.
When man deserted the lairs of the turbine, when he tore off the arms of the fire, so that the inner organs of the furnace died, and pulled out the eyes of the wheel, so that the dizzy light paused in its invisible circle, the eyes of the great energies, of the pure circles of force, of the stupendous power, what remained was a heap of pointless pieces of steel, and in the shops without men a widowed air and the lonesome odor of oil.
Nothing existed without that fragment hammering, without Ramírez, without the man in torn overalls.
Nothing was left but the hides of the engines, heaps of power gone dead, like black whales in the polluted depths of a sluggish sea, or mountain ranges suddenly drowned under the loneliness of outer space.