How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #7
Brother Kornhoer hesitated. "My vocation is to Religion," he said at last, "that is—to a life of prayer. We think of our work as a kind of prayer too. But that—" he gestured toward his dynamo "—for me seems more like play." (22.20)
On the one hand, Kornhoer's vocation prevents his technology from reaching the wider world and helping more people. On the other hand, it also prevents his technology from reaching the wider world and hurting more people. Is this one of those catch-22 thingies?
Quote #8
They contemplated the squiggles, quiggles, quids, thingumbobs, and doohickii in mystified silence. (24.89)
Father Zerchi's struggle with the Autoscribe is described using almost the exact same wording as Brother Francis's struggles to understand the blueprint. 1,200 years later, technology still confounds man's ability to understand it.
Quote #9
Economic corpuscles in an artery of Man, the behemoths charged heedlessly past the two monks who dodged them from lane to lane. To be felled by one of them was to be run over by truck after truck until a safety cruiser found the flattened imprint of a man on the pavement and stopped to clean it up. The autopilots' sensing mechanisms were better at detecting masses of metal than masses of flesh and bone. (25.75)
Remember the monk who risked blindness for technology? Now that technology has grown and spread throughout the world, the dangers posed by technology have also grown exponentially. In this case, it's literally running people over in the streets, Frogger style.