But my definition of “only connect” is largely informed, these days, by the Musk-scented meltdown of Twitter, which for many years was the place where I did my writing, such as it was. There are approximately one billion thinkpieces about the impact of social media on human connection and I’m not interested in adding to that collection here. Technology, especially social media, has connected humans in ways Forster never could have dreamed of, or if he did he would have woken up screaming. is enslaving to machines,” he wrote in his journal in 1908, and if the extent to which all our eyeballs are currently superglued to our devices is any indication, he was 100% right.īut he was also 100% wrong. This is ironic because Forster himself was something of a technophobe he feared that the technology of his time (airplanes, automobiles, the telephone) would fuck up true human connection even more than humans usually manage to fuck it up on their own. on a random weekday in the year of our lord 2023-has to do with technology. The interpretation of “only connect” that resonates the most with me at this particular moment in time-approximately 7:06 a.m. It’s Forster’s celebration of the persistence and insistence of love or his despair at the insurmountable barriers of class and gender or his directive to connect one’s head with one’s heart or a commentary on the difficulty of connecting our conventional personalities with our transgressive desires or. “Only connect” is the bucket into which readers and literary critics have poured oceans of analysis in the years since Howards End was published in 1910. Live in fragments no longer.” - Howards End, chapter 22 Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. “Only connect! That was her whole sermon. Within the novel itself, “only connect” pops out mostly in the internal monologues of Margaret Schlegel, who is a bit of a drama queen but who is also very earnest in her determination to overcome the obstacles to meaningful human connection: The book, described by the famously self-deprecating Forster as “approaching a good novel,” is about how comically, tragically bad most people are at forging authentic connections with other people. Forster meant by “Only Connect,” which is the epigram to Howards End. There has always been a lot of debate in Literary Circles about what E.M.
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