Earth Abides

by George R. Stewart

Once the fences are broken both in fact and in symbol, then there are no more blocks and chunks of land and sharp changes, but all is hazy and wavy, and fades from one into the other, as it was in the beginning.

“At least,” he thought, “life is quieter.”

“There are no atheists in fox holes,”

They would pay the penalty which in the history of the world, he knew, had always been inflicted upon organisms which specialized too highly.

Destroy the culture-pattern in which people lived, and often the shock was too great for the individuals. Take away family and job, friends and church, all customary amusements and routines, hope too—and life became walking death.

“The lights are going out! The lights of the world!” he thought, and he felt like a child going alone into the dark.

Yet in any system, as in a chain or a road, there is always a weakest link. (That is the fatal flaw of all systems.)

“Two are better than one . . . for if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow, but woe unto him that is alone when he falleth.”

“Surely the serpent will bite without enchantment.”

Between the two, him and everything outside him, there lay some kind of strange bond; as one changed, so the other changed also.

That old shyness rose up within him, as it had sometimes in the old days when the thought of attending a dance would put him into a sweat.

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

It made all the difference in the world whether you had that other to cut the grief in half, and the trouble suddenly seemed tiny.

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.

He himself would have had only the courage to live on, feeling death creep in closer year by year as once the darkness had crept in from the corners of the room when the lights were failing. Her stronger spirit had struck back against death, and already life built up anew within her. From her depths courage flowed out to him.

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.

“You see,” he said, “once you get something moving it’s easier to keep moving!” (Then he wondered whether that principle applied to groups of people, as well as to engines.)

Perhaps there was some kind of vacuum in the childish mind, and it had to be filled up with supernatural beliefs. Perhaps all this represented some kind of subconscious straining toward an explanation of the basis of life itself.

“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.

“Hostages to fortune!” he thought. When a man loved greatly, he laid himself open.

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

But in any basic struggle for power, the intellectual man went under.

He was alone, and then suddenly he felt again the Great Loneliness.

“No,” Ish found himself thinking, “she does not have a philosophy. She mentions the children and makes it a special case. Yet there is perhaps something deeper even than a philosophy in her. She is the mother; she thinks close to all the basic things of life.”

The State—it should be a kind of nourishing mother, protecting the individuals in their weakness, permitting a fuller life.

Never glad confident morning again!

All the best-laid plans could not prevent the disaster against which no plans had been laid.

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. So you killed rattlesnakes. But now nature had become so overwhelming that any attempt at its control was merely outside anyone’s circle of thought. You lived as part of it, not as its dominating power.

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

Must we not think then that this great civilization grew up, not by men’s desires, but rather by Forces and Pressures. Step by step, as villages grew larger, men must give up the free wandering life of berry-picking and seed-gathering and tie themselves to the security (and drudgery) of agriculture. Step by step, as villages grew more numerous, men must renounce the excitement of the hunt for the security (and drudgery) of cattle-keeping. Then at last it was like Frankenstein’s vast monster. They had not willed it, but it ruled them all. And so by a thousand little surreptitious paths they tried to escape.

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

Almost while they sat there, it seemed to Ish, a fast-growing tree sprang up on the hillside below them, and grew until it cut off the view across the Bay, where the rust-red towers of the great bridge still stood high. And then after a while the tree seemed to sicken and die and fall. Again, from where he liked to sit in the sun on the hillside, he could look out and see the bridge.

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

Yet certainly he could not help thinking that the 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 was the last of the old; they were the first of the new. But whether the new would follow the course which the old had followed, that he did not know, and now at last he was almost certain that he did not even desire that the cycle should be repeated. He suddenly thought of all that had gone to build civilization—of slavery and conquest and war and oppression.