Earth Abides
“One generation passes away, and another generation comes; But the earth abides forever.”
– Ecclesiastes 1:4.
What with
the country still recovering from the worst assault on democracy since the War
of 1812, or as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi proclaimed, the greatest disaster
since Pearl Harbor, I am reading Earth
Abides for the third or fourth time.
Earth Abides was first printed in 1949. That was
a good time for a post-apocalyptic novel, with World War II and its 80 million
dead still part of Earth psyche and Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech
only three years old. In the novel, a plague of some sort kills more than 99.99
percent of the people on Earth. Isherwood Williams, a graduate student
at Berkeley, survives, as do a couple dozen other people in the area.
There must
have been then a sense of fear that another war was possible, although it is
quite possible that people shoved that idea into a closet down the hall in the
brain, because surely mankind had learned dangers of … of dangerous things and
people and ideas and would not let those loose, but keep them confined, perhaps
through the United Nations, or maybe the United States would (a) as the only powerful
and wealthy nation on Earth, tell everybody else, “Sit down and shut up,” or;
(b) the people of the United States would stay home and go to work every day
and build things and buy things and have kids. Or, maybe people just sighed a
big sigh and said, “I’m glad that’s over,” or took a look around and said, “What
do we do now?”
Earth Abides was one of the first “End of
civilization as we know it” novels, certainly one of the most popular. Post- apocalyptic
works have become a staple in science fiction, with hundreds of readable works
published over the last 73 years.
Earth Abides makes my recommended reading list, even
though the main character is a Berkeley student. But, the university at that
time was not the school we know of today. Neither is anything else.
When done
with Earth Abides, I will call up
another post-apocalyptic work, Alas
Babylon. Hey, when you’re doing The End of the World, you might as well
throw nuclear war into the plague mix.
One
modernist note from the 1949 novel: Ish Williams’ wife, Emma, in conversation
says, “I can remember even reading in cheap things like the Sunday supplements that
we were always just at the point of running out of copper or oil, or were
exhausting the soil so we wouldn’t have anything to live on in the future.”
How things
have changed in the last three-quarters of a century.
