Earth Abides

by George R. Stewart

The trouble you’re expecting never happens; it’s always something that sneaks up the other way.”

Normal people, and Milt and Ann seemed to be certainly normal, did not concern themselves much with either the distant past or the distant future. Fortunately, they lived in the present.

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

The match lived, not when it lay in the box, but merely when it burned—and it could not burn forever. So too with men and women. Not by denying life was life lived.

If Saint Francis had hailed the sun as brother, might not we also say, “Oh, Brother Wheat! Oh, Sister Barley!” He smiled to himself. Yes, one could go on: “Oh, Grandfather Wheel! Oh, Cousin Compass! Oh, Friend Binomial Theorem!” All the discoveries of science and philosophy also might be imagined as standing shoulder to shoulder with man, even though the putting of the matter into words made it all sound a little ridiculous.

in general, Ish was surprised how little actual necessity they had to seek amusement. In the kind of life that they lived there always seemed to be a good deal to do just to get food and to support oneself in comfort and there was in it a great deal of satisfaction which did not call for anything as definite as amusement.

Ish and Em, when they discussed the matter privately, were not even sure that Mary was especially fond of Ralph, or Ralph of Mary. But everyone had always assumed that the two of them would get married because there was nobody else available whom either of them could take, just as it once was with princes and princesses. So perhaps, as Ish concluded, romantic love had merely been another necessary casualty of the Great Disaster.

There must be in their social bond something singularly captivating, and far superior to anything to be boasted of among us; for thousands of Europeans are Indians, and we have no examples of even one of those Aborigines having from choice become Europeans! —J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer

The people who live in any generation do much, he realized, either to create or to solve the problems for the people who come in the generations later.

her power lay deep in the springs of action; in a particular situation, though she might inspire courage and confidence in others, she herself seldom supplied an idea.

Ish, in a community which even yet numbered only thirty-six people, was so placed that he probably could wield more influence in the shaping of its future than an emperor or a chancellor or a president in the Old Times.

Why did not his mind, like other people’s minds, allow him to rest and be happy without any planning ahead into the future, whether of the next twenty-four hours or of the next twenty-four years? Why could he not lie quiet for as long as sixty seconds?

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. Sleep came to be thought a kind of relaxation, and “sleeping on the fob” a heinous sin. The turning out of the light and the ringing of the alarm-clock were not so much the symbols of man’s dual life as were the punching of the time-clock and the blowing of the whistle.

And always work became more laborious and odious, and play grew more artificial and febrile.

Then it was all so complicated that anything important had to be worked out a long time ahead; now you just decided on something, and did it.

boundaries fade even faster than fences. Imaginary lines need no rust to efface them.

Only by the power of intelligence, Ish believed firmly, had mankind ever risen to civilization, and only by further exercise of that same power, would mankind ever rise again.

drunkenness had never been a problem in the community at all. Perhaps the simpler life they were leading took away the need for such stimulation, or perhaps the mere fact that alcohol, like air, was free to everyone, removed the lure of difficulty which had previously surrounded it.

Joey’s brashness was only the expression of timidity gone too far the other way.

Between the plan and the fulfillment stands always the frail barrier of a human life.

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

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

perhaps, if I try for something less, I may in the end attain something more.”

“Yes, I am happy. Things are as they are, and I am part of them.”

Then at last Ish looked at the faces of the young men, and he saw that they were different from the faces of the men of long ago. These faces were young, but also they were calm, and they seemed to bear on them few lines of strain and worry and fear.

Many others there are too, each differing. In the distant years after these first years, the tribes will grow more numerous and come together, and cross-fertilize in body and in mind. Then, doubtless, blindly and of no one’s planning, will come new civilizations and the new wars.