The Day of the Triffids

by John Wyndham

Granted that they do have intelligence; then that would leave us with only one important superiority—sight. We can see, and they can’t. Take away our vision, and the superiority is gone. Worse than that—our position becomes inferior to theirs, because they are adapted to a sightless existence and we are not.”

That's a handy bit of foreshadowing...

“Anybody who has had a great treasure has always led a precarious existence,” she said reflectively. “I’ll go on bearing that in mind henceforth,” I told her. “It’s already very well impressed on mine,” she remarked.

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed person is...

I don’t think it had ever before occurred to me that man’s supremacy is not primarily due to his brain, as most of the books would have one think. It is due to the brain’s capacity to make use of the information conveyed to it by a narrow band of visible light rays.

“I point this out to you because the world we knew is gone—finished. “The conditions which framed and taught us our standards have gone with it. Our needs are now different, and our aims must be different. If you want an example, I would point out to you that we have all spent the day indulging with perfectly easy consciences in what two days ago would have been housebreaking and theft. With the old pattern broken, we have now to find out what mode of life is best suited to the new. We have not simply to start building again; we have to start thinking again—which is much more difficult, and far more distasteful. “Man remains physically adaptable to a remarkable degree. But it is the custom of each community to form the minds of its young in a mold, introducing a binding agent of prejudice. The result is a remarkably tough substance capable of withstanding successfully even the pressure of many innate tendencies and instincts. In this way it has been possible to produce a man who against all his basic sense of self-preservation will voluntarily risk death for an ideal—but also in this way is produced the dolt who is sure of everything and knows what is ‘right.’

This seems to be going full Heinlein right about here.

There is no compulsion. The choice is yours. Those to whom our offer does not appeal are at perfect liberty to go elsewhere and start a separate community on such lines as they prefer. “But I would ask you to consider very carefully whether or not you do hold a warrant from God to deprive any woman of the happiness of carrying out her natural functions.”

Eek.

Josella slid off the wall. With her arms outstretched, her wrists and fingers rippling, her body swaying, she danced, light as a thistledown, in a big circle in the moonlight. She came round to me, her eyes shining and her arms beckoning. And we danced, on the brink of an unknown future, to an echo from a vanished past.

She stood staring at me from eyes that could not see me. “Go away!” I repeated. I could not stand the reproach of her. She was not simply herself—she was thousands upon thousands of young lives destroyed… She came closer. “Why, I believe you’re crying!” she said. “Go away. For God’s sake, go away!” I told her. She hesitated, then she turned and felt her way back to the door. As she went out: “You can tell them I’ll be staying,” I said.

“Good-by, Bill—and thank you for trying to help us.” I looked down at her as she lay. I felt very angry with the stupidity of death. A thousand would have said: “Take me with you”; but she had said: “Stay with us.” And I never even knew her name.

There’s a whole lot of people don’t seem to understand that you have to talk to a man in his own language before he’ll take you seriously. If you talk tough and quote Shelley they think you’re cute, like a performing monkey or something, but they don’t pay any attention to what you say. You have to talk the kind of lingo they’re accustomed to taking seriously. And it works the other way too. Half the political intelligentsia who talk to a working audience don’t get the value of their stuff across—not so much because they’re over their audience’s heads, as because half the chaps are listening to the voice and not to the words, so they knock a big discount off what they do hear because it’s all a bit fancy, and not like ordinary, normal talk. So I reckoned the thing to do was to make myself bilingual, and use the right one in the right place—and occasionally the wrong one in the wrong place, unexpectedly. Surprising how that jolts ’em.

It’s queer, isn’t it? Decent intentions seem to be the most dangerous things around just now. It’s a damned shame, because this place could be managed, in spite of the proportion of blind. Everything it needs is lying about for the taking, and will be for a while yet. It’s only organizing that’s wanted.” “And willingness to be organized,” I suggested.

A new and ruthless logic has taken hold.

Until then I had always thought of loneliness as something negative—an absence of company, and, of course, something temporary… That day I had learned that it was much more. It was something which could press and oppress, could distort the ordinary and play tricks with the mind. Something which lurked inimically all around, stretching the nerves and twanging them with alarms, never letting one forget that there was no one to help, no one to care. It showed one as an atom adrift in vastness, and it waited all the time its chance to frighten and frighten horribly—that was what loneliness was really trying to do; and that was what one must never let it do…

Bill needs a Wilson!

To deprive a gregarious creature of companionship is to maim it, to outrage its nature. The prisoner and the cenobite are aware that the herd exists beyond their exile; they are an aspect of it. But when the herd no longer exists, there is, for the herd creature, no longer entity. He is a part of no whole, a freak without a place. If he cannot hold onto his reason, then he is lost indeed: most utterly and most fearfully lost, so that he becomes no more than the twitch in the limb of a corpse.