The Eternal Moment and Other Stories

by E.M. Forster

A collection that explores the human spirit through a series of fantasy vignettes.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Classics, Science Fiction, Anthologies, Fantasy, Literary Fiction

132 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1928

About the author

Edward Morgan Forster, generally published as E.M. Forster, was an English novelist, essayist, and short story writer. He is known best for his ironic and well-plotted novels examining class difference and hypocrisy in early 20th-century British society. His humanistic impulse toward understanding and sympathy may be aptly summed up in the epigraph to his 1910 novel Howards End: "Only connect".

He had five novels published in his lifetime, achieving his greatest success with A Passage to India (1924) which takes as its subject the relationship between East and West, seen through the lens of India in the later days of the British Raj.

Forster's views as a secular humanist are at the heart of his work, which often depicts the pursuit of personal connections in spite of the restrictions of contemporary society. He is noted for his use of symbolism as a technique in his novels, and he has been criticised for his attachment to mysticism. His other works include Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), The Longest Journey (1907), A Room with a View (1908) and Maurice (1971), his posthumously published novel which tells of the coming of age of an explicitly gay male character.

Reviews

[Micah Cummins · Rating 4 out of 5]

60th book of 2022

I really enjoyed this collection of short stories. My favorite was the science fiction piece, The Machine Stops, which for some reason hadn't crossed my radar until now. I have a BookTube discussion video posted on my YouTube channel, which I will link to below.

The Machine Stops | E. M. Forster
https://youtu.be/ojRBYGO4VtA

[Janelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an intriguing collection. The first story “The Machine Stops” seemed familiar and yes, I had read it before (probably a couple of decades ago!) in The Science Fiction Century and it’s a prophetic bit of scifi very timely in our recent isolation experience. It’s ultimately about the increasing reliance on technology and the neglect of nature. Quite amazing for a story written in 1909!
The next three stories concern the point of life and the nature of religion, heaven and hell. “The Story of the Siren” was probably the weakest story for me, a dark fantasy of the effects of a sea siren on those who see her. The last and title story is not fantasy at all, but a musing on the effects of tourism on a town popularised in a book, very clever and also the only story that really touches on class. An interesting read.

[Bionic Jean · Rating 3 out of 5]

"The Eternal Moment and other stories", is an early collection of short stories by the English author E. M. Forster first published in 1928. The individual stories within the collection are:

"The Eternal Moment"
"The Machine Stops" (link here to my separate review)
"The Point of It"
"Mr Andrews"
"Co-ordination"
"The Story of the Siren"

E. M. Forster wrote five major novels, many essays and critical works, and also some collections of short stories. All his early fiction is predominantly concerned with society in the first half of the 20th century. His tone is largely ironic, as he concentrates on class differences, seeking to expose the hypocrisy which he saw as rife.

The Eternal Moment

This longish story is similar in feel to "A Passage to India", in that it describes the personal mental and emotional journey of its central character, as much as her literal journey in the Italian Alps. By the end the destination is reached, both physically, and in the sense of her inward revelations about herself.

A common motif in Forster's works, is that of a long-remembered fleeting experience, which affects an individual's later life far more than could ever be expected at the time. There is such a pivotal moment in this story, around which the story forms itself. The central character, Miss Raby, is a successful novelist, yet feels unsatisfied in her emotional life, and distanced from all her social peers. She pays only lip service to the middle-class attitudes and behaviour of those around her, frequently making comments, or behaving in a manner which startles her friends.

"It was her habit to speak out; and there was no present passion to disturb or prevent her ... She was still detached ... And by speaking out she believed, pathetically enough, that she was making herself intelligible. Her remark seemed inexpressively coarse to Colonel Leyland."

In this quotation, the author's clinical eye is clear. He views both his main character, and the circles in which she moves, with equal detachment. Here is another time when Forster reveals another common feature or preoccupation; the rigid boundaries of a particular social class,

"she had hurt him too much; she had exposed her thoughts and desires to a man of another class. Not only she, but he himself and all their equals, were degraded by it."

In the story, the ageing Miss Reby has returned to the setting of the first novel she had written. It is an obscure Italian mountain village, which she is shocked to now find entirely different. The village has been irrevocably changed, through the subsequent tourism, due to the success of her novel. Her fond memories are quashed by what she now perceives as ugliness and vulgarity. But she still has one special moment which she cherishes, concerning a youthful flirtation. This perfect "Eternal Moment" of the title has informed all her subsequent experiences, although it was merely an elusive momentary experience. Forster's significant moments such as these, are often very subtle and undefined. Miss Raby has constantly reflected on this special moment, building into it great significance for her own life experience.

She is disillusioned and shocked to now encounter the man who had inspired such a beautiful memory, and to see the person and the moment with a new devastating perspective. Yet, on consideration, she feels she has learnt a great truth, by having this later experience, and thereby recognising the worth of her spontaneous joy and genuine feeling,

"In that moment of final failure, there had been vouchsafed to her a vision of herself and she saw that she had lived worthily. She was conscious of a triumph over experience and earthly facts, a triumph magnificent, cold, hardly human, whose existence no one but herself would ever surmise."

One event near the ending, comes as a surprise, a spontaneous gesture from one of the characters, outside the expectations and predictability of their class. This also is a favourite device of Forster's and gives the reader pause for thought, where other characters are often represented as puppets, entirely controlled by their status in the social class.

The Point of It

This is a much slighter tale, concerning two young men, Michael and Harold. Michael is staid and stodgy even as a youth, and is destined to have a boring unfulfilled life. The story starts,

"I don't see the point of it!" said Micky, through much imbecile laughter."

His friend Harold is a risk-taker, who is enthusiastically pushing himself beyond endurance, fighting the elements joyfully as he rows his boat. The story goes on to describe Michael's long monotonous life, and "The Point of It", is what he will not perceive until his life is over. Forster depicts a view of the other side, in this story; what will happen to his characters after death, and what meanings and significance they will take from it.

Mr Andrews

This short story goes a step further and actually concerns the souls of two men. One is a Christian, Mr Andrews, and the other, who is called "the Turk" throughout, is a Muslim. As their souls move towards eternal life, they discuss their previous lives. As they do so, each becomes more convinced that the other's life contravened all the behaviours which would be necessary for them to be admitted to Heaven. When they reach the Gates of Heaven, each is filled with sympathy and concern for the other's salvation, and spontaneously cries out an appeal for their new friend. They are allowed in.

Inside Heaven are all manner of gods, "Buddha, and Vishnu, and Allah, and Jehovah, and the Elohim. He saw little ugly determined gods who were worshipped by a few savages in the same way ... There were cruel gods ... there were gods who were peevish or deceitful or vulgar. No aspiration of humanity was unfulfilled. There was even an intermediate state for those who wished it, and for the Christian Scientists a place where they could demonstrate that they had not died."

The irony of their life in heaven is that neither is as happy there, even with all their expectations and desires fulfilled, as they were when each thought only of the other.

Co-ordination

This a more tongue-in-cheek story, a satire on a too-rigid Educational ethos. It concerns a Miss Haddon, a school teacher, whose Principal informs all the teachers that they are to teach a new "Co-ordinative system". They are all to teach the same subject, Napoleon, by the same system. Thus Miss Haddon, as a music teacher, is to teach the "Eroica symphony", which had been begun in Napoleon's honour.

Up in Heaven Beethoven is surprised by all the new interest in his symphony, as are all the other souls whose works are being studied. The lower orders in Heaven assure them that the works are interpreted with sensitivity and insight. But the schoolgirls,

"settled down gloomily. They were already bored to tears by the new system." They easily become distracted, succumbing to the temptation to dance and join in with a passing band. Miss Haddon meanwhile has become entranced when she put a conch shell to her ear to listen. The head teacher also has an other-worldly experience when she puts the shell to her ear.

This is another concern of E. M. Forster, a deeper belief, associated with his interest in Mediterranean "paganism". He believed that if individuals were to achieve satisfaction in their lives, they needed to both keep contact with the earth, and also to cultivate their imaginations. As the story develops, all the teachers and pupils disregard the new ideas, larking around and generally having a good time together, partying and playing games. The Principal claims,

"I was obliged to take it up, because that sort of thing impresses the Board of Education", to much hilarity and joy.

The final part is set in Heaven, where Mephistopheles is convinced that there is no co-ordination on Earth, and that he has therefore won his case against the angel Raphael. There is a satisfying - and in this case predictable - twist.

The Story of the Siren

This is the most abstruse of these stories. Several of these stories have included symbols; the characters Michael and Harold themselves are really symbols for action and joy as opposed to passivity and dullness.

This story tells the tale of a young man who has seen a siren living deep in the sea. He marries a girl who also has seen her. The people believe that their child will reveal the siren to everybody, bringing her out of the sea, to "destroy silence and save the world". However a priest insists that the girl is pushed into the sea to be drowned. Therefore the child, a potential saviour of the world, is never allowed to be born.

It is difficult to fathom the meaning behind this story. E. M. Forster was very concerned with spiritual ideas. Some of his ancestors had been members of a social reform group within the Church of England. He was also interested in Eastern religions. Forster's experience of the different religions he came across during his time in India, his interest in paganism, his fear that a deliberate exaggeration of imagination could undermine an individual's sense of reality; all these thoughts played into his explorations here, where he points out the dangers of a distorted perspective. One interpretation could be that it would require a revolution in values, a casting out of old traditional theologies, in order to achieve perfect harmony with Nature. Only then might come the emergence of a new man, or possibly a saviour.

This is an interesting collection, and in these stories a reader can discern many of the same themes which E. M. Forster is concerned with in his longer novels. His early experiences in life, as with so many writers, go some way to explaining his later influences and preoccupations.

E. M. Forster's father, who had died when he was a baby, had been strongly evangelical with a highly developed sense of moral responsibility. His mother, however, was more open and relaxed. Although she had brought him up, his paternal aunts were also very influential. So the young Forster had experienced plenty of tensions in his early domestic life, and he became adept at transcribing these into his written works. It also meant that he was particularly sensitive, for the society of the time, to the importance of women in their own right.

The reflective, unusual stories here, reveal that their author was concerned to break with rigid conformity and to "shake off the shackles" of Victorianism. Forster had been a day pupil at a private boarding school in Tonbridge, Kent, for instance, and this time made him extremely critical of the English Public School system. His experiences in India, surrounded by different religions, coupled with his earlier schooling, resulted in his view that a certain amount of scepticism was healthy.

[Bionic Jean · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Eternal Moment is on the longish side for a short story. It is similar in feel to "A Passage to India", in that it describes the personal mental and emotional journey of its central character, as much as her literal journey in the Italian Alps. By the end the destination is reached, both physically, and in the sense of her inward revelations about herself.

A common motif in Forster's works, is that of a long-remembered fleeting experience, which affects an individual's later life far more than could ever be expected at the time. There is such a pivotal moment in this story, around which the story forms itself. The central character, Miss Raby, is a successful novelist, yet feels unsatisfied in her emotional life, and distanced from all her social peers. She pays only lip service to the middle-class attitudes and behaviour of those around her, frequently making comments, or behaving in a manner which startles her friends.

"It was her habit to speak out; and there was no present passion to disturb or prevent her ... She was still detached ... And by speaking out she believed, pathetically enough, that she was making herself intelligible. Her remark seemed inexpressively coarse to Colonel Leyland."

In this quotation, the author's clinical eye is clear. He views both his main character, and the circles in which she moves, with equal detachment. Here is another time when Forster reveals another common feature or preoccupation; the rigid boundaries of a particular social class,

"she had hurt him too much; she had exposed her thoughts and desires to a man of another class. Not only she, but he himself and all their equals, were degraded by it."

In the story, the ageing Miss Reby has returned to the setting of the first novel she had written. It is an obscure Italian mountain village, which she is shocked to now find entirely different. The village has been irrevocably changed, through the subsequent tourism, due to the success of her novel. Her fond memories are quashed by what she now perceives as ugliness and vulgarity. But she still has one special moment which she cherishes, concerning a youthful flirtation. This perfect "Eternal Moment" of the title has informed all her subsequent experiences, although it was merely an elusive momentary experience. Forster's significant moments such as these, are often very subtle and undefined. Miss Raby has constantly reflected on this special moment, building into it great significance for her own life experience.

She is disillusioned and shocked to now encounter the man who had inspired such a beautiful memory, and to see the person and the moment with a new devastating perspective. Yet, on consideration, she feels she has learnt a great truth, by having this later experience, and thereby recognising the worth of her spontaneous joy and genuine feeling,

"In that moment of final failure, there had been vouchsafed to her a vision of herself and she saw that she had lived worthily. She was conscious of a triumph over experience and earthly facts, a triumph magnificent, cold, hardly human, whose existence no one but herself would ever surmise."

One event near the ending, comes as a surprise, a spontaneous gesture from one of the characters, outside the expectations and predictability of their class. This also is a favourite device of Forster's and gives the reader pause for thought, where other characters are often represented as puppets, entirely controlled by their status in the social class.

The Eternal Moment is from the volume on my shelves "Collected Short Stories volume 2"

[Semi · Rating 2 out of 5]

rich people are insane

[Austin Lynch · Rating 2 out of 5]

Six short reviews for six short stories:

The Machine Stops - 3.5

I've written a longer review of this one separately. Well worth reading for its stunning prescience, but as a work of literature it leaves something to be desired. Another reviewer said that, as a writer of science fiction, Forster 'gets in his own way'. Strictly as a work of writing it probably doesn't deserve the extra half-star.

The Point of It - 2

I found in this one a similar-ish theme to his other short story the Other Side of the Hedge, but with more pomp and less punch.

Mr. Andrews - 2

The same low rating but decisively better than the previous story. The good part of this one is essentially identical to the good part of Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt.

Co-ordination - 1

Kind of a meaningless upper-crust flight of fancy to my modern American eyes. I don't know what a Victorian English girls school is supposed to be like and I found the scenes in heaven (?) frankly baffling.

The Story of the Siren - 3.5

The only story in this collection that successfully left me wanting more (if that's what 'success' is in a short story). This piece is hard to pin down but it has a great atmosphere. Forster at his most comfortable, the frontier between cultures.

The Eternal Moment - 2.5

I'm not as hot on this one as others seem to be. In some ways, this story is quite similar to a Room with a View, but it never quite gets off the ground and its climax is more of a fizzle. The aspects of the story that I found interesting (namely the impact her writing had on this town, how she reconciles with that) were sort of left by the wayside in favor of a half-baked tragic plot that the reader never gets fully invested in. Maybe I need to re-read this one but I don't know if I really care to. I'll probably stick to the author's longer books from now on.

[Tripp]

Of the six stories presented here, the title story struck me as very good, "Co-ordination" as all right, two others, "Mr. Andrews" and "The Story of the Siren," as so-so, and the first two in the collection--"The Machine Stops" and "The Point of It"--as entirely too obvious in their separate purposes and almost tiresome.

"The Machine Stops" is one of those dystopian tales that can't get out of its own way, telegraphing both meaning and conclusion from almost the first page. In the far future, humanity has rendered the Earth's surface uninhabitable and so humanity has built cities underground, with a nearly omnipotent machine responsible for every aspect of life. In this way, it prefigures the Matrix movies, except that here humanity has come to worship the Machine. People have fallen out of the habit of direct interaction, a point which leads to one of this story's characteristically heavy-handed moments:

When Vashti swerved away from the sunbeams with a cry, [the air-ship attendant] behaved barbarically--she put out her hand to steady her.
"How dare you!" the passenger exclaimed. "You forget yourself!"
The woman was confused, and apologised for not having let her fall. People never touched one another. The custom had become obsolete, owing to the Machine.

Forster should have stopped at "…let her fall," and allowed the reader to infer the rest. Instead, he hammers away, here and elsewhere in the story, as if the light touch he displays in his novels has abandoned him here.

He's back on his game with "The Eternal Moment," writing about an elderly novelist visiting an Italian village made famous by her first, most successful novel, documenting her increasing dismay at the changes she inadvertently wrought there, particularly in the case of a man who had once worked for her as a porter. In fact, an early description of this man, in his role as porter long ago to the novelist, is classic Forster:

"Hitherto he had known his place. But he was too cheap: he gave us more than our money's worth. That, as you know, is an ominous sign in a low-born person."

The wry turn of phrase, verging on the epigrammatic, that conveys information about both the speaker and the one spoken of, this to me is vintage Forster.

[John Oswalt · Rating 4 out of 5]

The strongest story here is the title story, "The Eternal Moment". The lead story "The Machine Stops" is OK, but Forster is totally out of his element; he is no H. G. Wells. The middle stories are OK, but strike me as minor.

Ah, but "The Eternal Moment." This is E. M. Forster at his best. The setting -- upper-class English people travelling in Switzerland (Baedeker in hand) -- is his forte. The structure is that of a short story, focusing on a single event, but that event is thoroughly and thoughtfully explored at novella length. The story deals with relations between upper-class English and lower-class Italians, and explores the class system in its waning days in the early 20th century. The writing is masterful. Every character, every event, every scene, sets up and reflects upon this event, which took place 20 years before the story takes place. I loved it.

[#DÏ4B7Ø Chinnamasta-Bhairav]

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To SEE a WORLD in a Grain of Sand,
And a HEAVEN in a Wild Flower,
Hold INFINITY in the palm of your hand
And ETERNITY in an Hour"
~ William Blake ~

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Form is Emptiness; Emptiness is form.
Form is not different than Emptiness;
Emptiness is not different than form
~ Heart Sutra ~

Like the ocean and its waves,
inseparable yet distinct

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" I and The Father are one,
I am The Truth,
The Life and The Path.”

Like a river flowing from its source,
connected and continuous

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Thy kingdom come.
Let the reign of divine
Truth, Life, and Love
be established in me,
and rule out of me all sin;
and may Thy Word
enrich the affections of all mankind

A mighty oak tree standing firm against the storm,
As sunlight scatters the shadows of night
A river nourishing the land it flows through

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[Eleanor]

I read all of Forster’s proper novels as a teenager, except for Maurice; for a time he was my favourite author. This collection therefore counts towards my B-Sides reading project and is also Book 7 of 20 Books of Summer 2024.

It’s most notable for the story “The Machine Stops”, in which everyone lives in isolated cells set within subterranean tunnels. Society is run by the Machine, which provides everything at the touch of a button: food, bed, dental and medical care, music, literature, instantaneous communication with others. When the protagonist Vashti’s son, Kuno, begins speaking of his experiences on an unauthorised trip to the surface, Vashti refuses to entertain the conversation, but the Machine’s apparent deterioration and eventual breakdown reveals the terrible helplessness of humankind. Viewers of Doctor Who will recognise the idea behind the recent episode “Dot and Bubble” (including some of the snobbery and self-interested lack of integrity that episode skewered). Forster didn’t usually write sci-fi, but you can perhaps trace the thesis of “The Machine Stops” to his passionate defence of human connection and the value of art in Howards End and A Room with a View. The rest of the collection contains some odd, brief, metaphysical shorts: “The Point of It” posits an inexplicable afterlife suffered by a man who abandoned honest judgment while alive, in favour of complacency, while “Mr. Andrews” and “Co-ordination”, which also deal with experiences of heaven and afterlife, are sweet but a bit thin, like sermon anecdotes. “The Story of the Siren” and “The Eternal Moment”, both set abroad, deal in different ways with the spiritually diminishing effects of exposure to tourism and money on isolated rural locations; again, you can see some of the preoccupations of Forster’s longer fiction here, as in A Passage to India and Where Angels Fear to Tread. This collection isn’t his best work, but it’s a very interesting sidebar to the career of a writer I usually think of as a champion of secular humanism.

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

This collection of stories includes some early work by E.M. Forster. I found the first few stories a bit hard to get into, but the later stories were stronger. A story called Mr. Andrews is set at the pearly gates of heaven, but takes a different spin on this mythic image as two men, one Christian and the other Moslem, are surprised to encounter each other. The story is short, but powerful, and still speaks to our present day.

The title story is remarkable. It's a story of a woman, Miss Raby, who'd become a famous authoress. She'd written wrote about her experiences as a young woman when visiting a small village called Vorta within Italy in a novel called "The Eternal Moment." Readers had come to Vorta to sample the experience noted in Raby's novel and many enjoyed it. The presence of tourists provided incentives for the local people to build out the town with a number of large hotels. This story is narrated from the vantage of of Miss Raby some twenty years later. She visits Vorta and finds that many of the people she'd enjoyed on the earlier visit had aged, passed away or changed. In a similar regard, the Vorta she'd loved and written about had also changed. This story offers tension between her older and younger self as she encounters the much changed village, but still sees many of the charms which had attracted her younger self. The story progresses well as Miss Raby puzzles her companions Colonel Leyland, a retired British officer, and another woman, Elizabeth, who is both a maid and chaperone to the couple. Miss Raby apparently is no longer writing, but the sense of truth seeking she'd developed in her work is alive and influences how she sees the village, it's people and the tourists who encroached upon the world she'd created in her novel.

This book is a good read, but the title story stands high above the others in its depiction of how a work of fiction has influenced the physical and emotional world in ways that surprise even the author.

[Ron Adkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

A local company recently staged an opera adaptation of The Machine Stops, the first story in this brief collection. Intrigued that E.M. Forster had written science fiction, I picked up the book and thoroughly enjoyed the source story. It was, especially for the era it was written, imaginative and full of compelling detail. It drew comparisons to Karel Capek's play, R.U.R. The teaser blurb on the cover, though, is a bit of a fib. "The Machine Stops," "Co-Ordination," and the "Story of the Siren" are the only pieces with science fiction or fantasy elements. The rest are classic Forster - analyses of the classes and the interaction of people within those classes. The title story will stick with me forever. In all, a good "afternoon on the couch" read, especially if you enjoyed Howard's End or A Passage to India.

[Galactic Hero · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mixed in with the beautiful exploration of characters and themes, one can find in these century-old stories some ideas that are out and out prescient: The Machine Stops all but predicts Facebook, and what is The Eternal Moment about if not TripAdvisor? Not sure what app the hokey ones in the middle about angels were about.

[Eric · Rating 3 out of 5]

So so. "The Machine Stops" was the highlight and felt like it could have been written today about a future we're headed towards. For some reason I thought this was a collection of sci-fi stories but that was the only one. The others were general or supernatural religious fiction and didn't speak to me.

[Katherine]

I don't really have much to say about this one. My book group was going to be reading one of the stories ("The Machine Stops"), and since it was a short collection, I read the rest of them, too. It was interesting, and some of the speculative elements felt surprisingly modern for such an old collection. "Mr. Andrews" was probably my favorite.

[Finestrelle2020 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Raccolta di ben tre raccolte di racconti Forster, offre storie sorprendenti: fantastiche, gotiche, fantascientifiche... Un Forster molto diverso dal più noto, acuto e dissacrante. Una chicca assolutamente da non perdere!

[Victor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very existential stories. I picked it up for The Machine Stops, which was amazing. And the rest, around class, deeds, intellectualism,changes, and how they relate to the stages around the end of a long life. Very thought provoking.

[Mark's wife Sue · Rating 4 out of 5]

Prescient.

[Regina · Rating 3 out of 5]

Eerie how some of these stories predict the world we are living in today. Worth reading and always a pleasure to read Forsyer.

[Jeanie Fritz · Rating 4 out of 5]

While I do not agree with Forster's worldview, his stories are thought-provoking, and his characters often pose the questions with which humanists continually struggle.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

These are some decent stories. It’s interesting to see Forster in short form, only having read A Passage to India. Solid writing, bot overblown. Wouldn’t mind checking out more.

[Tamzin · Rating 2 out of 5]

All pretty boring except for ‘the machine stops’ which was just exceptional

[Lisa Daleiden-Brugman · Rating 3 out of 5]

I did not read all of the short stories in this small book. Just The Machine Stops which was Forster’s eerie description of a futuristic society. Written in 1928, it feels… likely.

[Jean Carlton · Rating 2 out of 5]

My favorite story in this collection is The Machine Stops. A slim volume, the other stories not that compelling.

[Andra Banu · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5*

[Anne Kennedy · Rating 1 out of 5]

Challenge: a story set in the future. The story set in the future ("The Machine Stops") and also the last ("The Eternal Moment") were good, but the others were horrible.

[Kira · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is definitely a great story that introduces an interesting topic

[Kathy Nealen · Rating 3 out of 5]

On the whole, other worldly and sometimes bizarre

[Paige Maroney-Brown · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

[Mike Lisanke · Rating 4 out of 5]

An above average hit the Eternal Moment was. All good stories