Earth Abides

Was it really, as he sometimes imagined, that all the individuals were still suffering under a kind of shock as the result of the sudden destruction of their old society? His studies in anthropology supplied him with examples—the head-hunters and the plains Indians, who had lost the will to readjust and even the will to live, after their traditional way of life had rudely been made impossible. If they could no longer go head-hunting or ride out to steal horses and take scalps, they had no desire for anything else either. Or, with a mild climate and food-supplies easy to obtain, was there now simply no stimulus to change? He could recollect possible examples of this kind also—some of the South Sea islanders, or those tropical peoples who. lived chiefly on bananas. Or was it something else?

Fortunately, he had enough background of philosophy and history to. keep his perspective. He was actually, he realized, struggling to solve a problem which had baffled philosophers from the time when they had first become conscious of problems at all. He was facing the basic question of the dynamics of society. What made a society change? He, as a student, was more fortunate than Koheleth or Plato or Malthus or Toynbee. He saw a society reduced in size until it had attained the simplicity of a laboratory experiment. Yet, whenever he had arrived at this stage of argument, another thought cut across and disturbed the simplicity. He began to feel himself less scientific but more human, to think more nearly as Em thought. This society along San Lupo Drive was not really, a philosopher’s neat microcosm, a small dip out of the general ocean of humanity. No—it was a group of individuals. It was Ezra and Em and the boys—yes, and Joey! Change the individuals, and the whole situation changed. Change even one individual! In the place of Em, if we had had—well, say, Dotty Lamour? Or, instead of George, one of those high-powered minds that he remembered from his University years—Professor Sauer, perhaps! Again the situation would change.

Or would it? Possibly not, for in the test the physical environment might be stronger, and might force the aberrant individuals into its mould.

But in one detail Ish thought that Em was wrong. She did not need to fear that he was worrying too much about the situation and would end up with ulcers or a neurosis. Instead, his observation of what was happening kept him interested in life. At first, just after the Great Disaster, he had devoted himself to observing the changes in the world as the result of the disappearance of man. After twenty-one years, however, the world had fairly well adjusted itself, and further changes were too slow to call for day-to-day or even month-to-month observation. Now, however, the problem of society—its adjustment and reconstitution—had moved to the fore, and become his chief interest.

Then at this point in the recurrent course of his thinking he always had to correct himself again. He could not, and should not, be merely the observer and student. Plato and the others—each of them could merely watch and comment, even cynically, if he so felt. Through his writings he might influence future generations, but he himself was in no appreciable way responsible for the growth and development of the society in which he lived. Only now and then had the scholar also become the ruler—Marcus Aurelius, Thomas More, Woodrow Wilson. To be sure, Ish realized that he himself was not a ruler exactly, but he was the man of ideas, the thinker, in a community of only a few individuals. Necessarily the others turned to him in their rare times of trouble, and if any real emergency should arise, he would almost certainly have to assume leadership.

The thought had already in the course of the years sent him to the City Library after books about scholars who had also become rulers. Their fates were not comforting. Marcus Aurelius had worn himself out, body and soul, in bloody and fruitless campaigns on the Danube frontier. Thomas More had gone to the scaffold, and afterwards, ironically, he had been canonized as a martyr of the Church. The biographers often called Wilson a martyr also, although no Church of Peace had made him St. Woodrow. No, the scholar in power had not prospered notably. Yet he, 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.

Heavy rains in the week after New Years had slowed the falling of the water level in the reservoir. Then, a little earlier than usual, came the mid-winter dry spell.