Earth Abides

by George R. Stewart

city-dwellers, and when the city died, they would hardly survive without it. They would pay the penalty which in the history of the world, he knew, had always been inflicted upon organisms which specialized too highly.

When the opportunity was at your hand, you did not dare to seize it. When the opportunity was lost, it became precious.

But in no way did civilization change life more than by sharpening the line between work and play, and at last that division came to be more important than the old one between sleeping and waking.

He told them of all the growth of man, that struggling creature, who had gradually learned this, learned that, learned to develop himself here, and restrain himself there, and through infinite error and trouble and foolishness and cruelty, at last had achieved so spectacularly before the end came upon him. They were mildly interested.

Perhaps there were too many people, too many old ways of thinking, too many books. Perhaps the ruts of thinking had grown too deep and the refuse of the past lay too heavy around us, like piles of garbage and old clothes.

Perhaps rationalism—like so much else—had only been one of the luxuries which men could afford under civilization.

In the times of civilization men had really felt themselves as the masters of creation. Everything had been good or bad in relation to man.

What a strange thing then is this great civilization, that no sooner have men attained it than they seek to flee from it!

The stars in their courses! What was man, little man, to withstand them?

“Yes, a tribe is like a child. You can show it the way by which it should grow up, and perhaps you can direct it a little, but in the end the child will go his own way, and so will the tribe.”

In civilization, he thought, these young men would have all been considering one another as rivals, because in the days of civilization there were many men. They did not think much about the world outside of them because man seemed to be greatly stronger than all that outside world. So they thought mostly about how they could get the better of other people, and so they were likely not to trust each other altogether, not even brother and brother. But now, he thought, when men are very few, each of these young men wanders freely with his bow in hand and his dog at heel, but needs his comrade close at call.

men had lost that old dominance and the arrogance with which they had once viewed the animals, and were now acting more or less as equals with them.

He suddenly thought of all that had gone to build civilization—of slavery and conquest and war and oppression.

Like the man, so the creation of man would not last forever.