Earth Abides

by George R. Stewart

At the funeral of Homo sapiens there will be few mourners. Canis familiaris as an individual will perhaps send up a few howls, but as a species, remembering all the kicks and curses, he will soon be comforted and run off to join his wild fellows. Homo sapiens, however, may take comfort from the thought that at his funeral there will be three wholly sincere mourners.

Milt and Ann, too, were 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.

“Genius is the capacity for seeing what is not there.” Of course, like every other definition of genius, that one could be shot to pieces also, because it obviously included the madman, as well as the genius.

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

Why could he never learn to worry less about problems? Problems not infrequently solved themselves.

How much did man strike outward to affect all his surroundings and how much did the surroundings press in upon him?

For he realized that a man should make peace with himself, even though all conditions changed, and that a man should face the question of whether in his life he had satisfied the ideas which he had built up within himself as to what he should be, and that all this was not a matter of priests and religion but of a man himself.

Men go and come, but earth abides.” About