Earth Abides

by George R. Stewart

Biologically, man has for too long a time been rolling an uninterrupted run of sevens.

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.

saw the eyes lose focus, and the eyelids drop shut, and so he spoke no more, but he sat there by the bed, holding the hand in his own. Then, perhaps because sleep is so like death, a horrible fear swept in upon him. “Hostages to fortune!” he thought. When a man loved greatly, he laid himself open.

Through all of history it runs as a plaint. “If the young king had not fallen ill. . . .If the prince had lived. . . .If the general had not so recklessly exposed himself. . . .If the president had not overworked. . . . ” Between the plan and the fulfillment stands always the frail barrier of a human life.

We are afraid, but we do not talk of fear. We have many deep thoughts and doubts, but we do not speak them. We say, “Justice”; we say, “The Law”; we say, “We, the people”; we say, “The State.”

“It is strange,” thought Ish. “She has none of those things on which I used to count so much—not education, not even high intelligence. She supplies no ideas. Yet she has a greatness within her and the final affirmation. Without her, in these last few weeks, we would have despaired and lost hold of life and gone under.” And he felt himself humble beside her.

He was only a bright little boy. He could not have changed things. He could not have stood against all the pressing current of this altered world. He would only have struggled and struggled, and in the end he would not have succeeded. He would have been unhappy. “Joey,” he thought, and he put the thoughts into words. “Joey was too much like me. I always struggle. I can never merely be happy.”

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

“A tribe is like a child,” he said once, in that thin piping old-man’s voice, which every day seemed more like a bird’s—and then he coughed. When he recovered, he spoke again. “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.”

But most of all, I think, we needed Em, for she gave us courage, and without courage there is only a slow dying, not life.”

“Young man,” he said, “are you happy?” The young man named Jack looked startled at this question, and he glanced in both directions before answering, and then he spoke. “Yes, I am happy. Things are as they are, and I am part of them.”

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.