From The Artist as Pierrot

.....Few artists mention the products of science and industry without a point of sarcasm in their voices—the pauper’s sarcasm for the tycoon. Not I. I cannot bring myself to use my electric typewriter for sermons against the age of electric typewriters. I would rather know what makes it work tham mumble elegiacally about quills. Obscenely impotent and ignorant myself, I admire that foaming torrent of creation. I take my hat off to a flashlight battery. I salute a transistorized circuit. And do so without knowing to what I have made my bow; pronouncing the word—transistorized!—the way the old women in black shawls murmur mysterious Latin in church. They do not resent the officiating priest. They know their places; and I know mine. This human fertility astonishes and delights me. Fabulous digital computers! Splendid hurls into space! Cunning glass filaments where speech travels as light! I well remember as a child standing by the railway tracks in Antwerp’s Central Station, a terminal in the grandest Iron Age style, and gazing dumb with admiration at the wheels of the steam locomotive. I was a dwarf to each wheel, but that was nothing: I could not believe that human beings had invented and assembled that methodical jungle of hoops, pistons, spokes, rods and ratchets, and quid non? I saw thousands of pieces, each interlocked with every other, and each doing its appointed work at precisely the right moment, when, responding to the whistle’s signal, the hissing, the heaving, and the tugging began, and that colossal metallic mass, pulling a dozen contemptibly passive coaches, yearned its bulk out of the station. Never, never, I realized, would a dunce like me invent so many mannikins, much less Napoleonize them into a marching army.
These locomotives were good instructors, for they showed the machinery to the naked eye. I know that they were primitive toys compared to our space shuttles today. But for a child, at any rate, the space crafts, and even the jet airliners, conceal their secrets; they are smooth shells and discreetly enclose their incredible viscera. They cannot astonish a ten-year-old boy like those ostentatious mastodons.
As for the evil which all these manufactured beasts have inflicted—the pollution, the ugliness, the violence—why, if I can be nostalgic for the Middle Ages in spite of the bubonic plague (and I am), I can also pay homage to my six-cylinder in spite of the noxious emissions (and I do). I do not feel the need to rush into the unpolluted wilderness. Wildernesses bore me....Welcome children of the human intellect!

(Pp. 280-281.)