QUOTE : As we traveled faster, Walker meant, so would we live faster, leaving the slow, vegetative world behind, blurring past animals and one another, seeing more but also seeing less—seeing, at least, differently. A corollary was that living faster meant embracing the mechanical; the machines that augmented our rates of movement and of change. “From west to east,” Walker concludes, “and from north to south, the mechanical principle, the philosophy of the nineteenth century, will spread and extend itself. The world has received a new impulse.”71 It had, and the transformation would be profound. But the human world still largely lingered in the dark for half the earth’s each turning. There were remedies for that condition as well: oils, rushes, tallow, the fat of pigs, coal gas, whales. All would serve in their time.