The Day of the Triffids

by John Wyndham

“Anybody who has had a great treasure has always led a precarious existence,”

“And yonder all before us lie Deserts of vast eternity,”

“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!

After a bit I got tired of being amusing and seeing them give a kind of double laugh, half with me and half at me, whenever I said what I thought.

There is an inability to sustain the tragic mood, a phoenix quality of the mind. It may be helpful or harmful, it is just a part of the will to survive—yet, also, it has made it possible for us to engage in one weakening war after another. But it is a necessary part of our mechanism that we should be able to cry only for a time over even an ocean of spilt milk—the spectacular must soon become the commonplace if life is to be supportable.

“It’s not only your fault—it’s a self-created fault. Moreover, it’s an affectation to consider yourself too spiritual to understand anything mechanical. It is a petty

and a very silly form of vanity. Everyone starts by knowing nothing about anything, but God gives him—and even her—brains to find out with. Failure to use them is not a virtue to be praised; even in women it is a gap to be deplored.”

It’s queer, isn’t it? Decent intentions seem to be the most dangerous things around just now.

“This is a pause—just a heaven-sent pause—while we get over the first shock and start to collect ourselves, but it’s no more than a pause. Later we’ll have to plow; still later we’ll have to learn how to make plowshares; later than that we’ll have to learn how to smelt the iron to make the shares. What we are on now is a road that will take us back and back and back until we can—if we can—make good all that we wear out. Not until then shall we be able to stop ourselves on the trail that’s leading down to savagery. But once we can do that, then maybe we’ll begin to crawl slowly up again.”