The End of October

by Lawrence Wright

That he took a bath in all this life, everywhere around him.”

It had never been so clear what herd animals humans were. Almost overnight, they had disappeared from the subways and buses

and trains. And almost overnight, they returned, though in smaller numbers. The worst was over, people told themselves. Time to pick up life where we left it.

But happiness is a fickle quality, and Jill often feared that a tidal wave of despair was awaiting her, the reckoning for years of bliss.

I mean, why do we have to think that heaven is a place we can go only when we die? What if we have half our life awake on earth and then half in heaven, and then eventually it’s all in heaven and that’s when we’re dead?”

She knew that one of the children in the pictures had died. She supposed that all group photos would be looked at that way in the future: who lived through it, who did not.

Someone did this, Henry thought. Nature can be cruel in its way, but his own experience had shown that the hand of man was also capable of ingenious and fatal destruction. We truly are godlike, he thought. Our curse.

there was one maxim that he had drawn from Albert Schweitzer’s philosophy: All life is sacred. “Sacred” was a word that never came to Henry’s lips, but it expressed his stance in the world. Life itself was a miracle—another word that Henry would never use, but a truth he inwardly acknowledged.