We are all young barbarians still enthralled by our new toys. What other meaning can our air races have? A man flies higher, runs faster. We forget the reason why. For the moment the race itself outweighs its purpose. And this is always so. For the colonial soldier who is founding an empire, the meaning of life is in conquest. That soldier despises the settler. But was the goal of his conquest not the establishment of that settler? In the exhilaration of our progress we have made similar use of men in the building of railways, the construction of factories, the sinking of oil wells. We have forgotten sometimes that these structures were meant to be of service to men. While we were conquering soldiers, we had the morality of soldiers. But now we must be settlers. We must bring life into this new house which as yet has no human face. If one man’s truth was in building, for the other it lies in living.
No doubt our house will gradually become more human. The more perfect machines become, the more they are invisible behind their function. It seems that all man’s industrial effort, all his calculations and his nights spent poring over drawings, all these visible signs have as their sole end the achievement of simplicity. It is as if only the experimentation of several generations can define the curve of a column or a ship’s hull or an aeroplane fuselage, and give it the ultimate, elementary purity of the curve of a breast or a shoulder. On the surface it seems that the work of engineers, designers and research mathematicians consists only in polishing and refining, easing this joint and balancing that wing until there is no longer a wing joined visibly to a fuselage, but a perfectly developed form freed at last from its matrix, a spontaneous and mysterious form, with the unified quality of a poem. It seems that perfection is attained not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to remove.
