by Roger Elwood
“Do that, though. Or get Nora something cheaper she’d like just as much. I’d enjoy lending it to you, but a Mentor ought not, except for real emergencies. There’s a discussion of that in the Book of Greek Love. I agree with the authors of that symposium.”
“Time I read that, isn’t it?”
“No, not quite. Read a little more in the Ancients first—the Phaedrus, say—the Sonnets of Shakespeare—one or two writers of the so-called Liberation at the close of your sad old fiftieth century. They really were getting slightly liberated just before things went on the skids, one of the big historic ironies. Then you can get into my copy of the Book of Greek Love, maybe on that cruise, and add your marginal notes to mine . . .
“Andrei?”
“Present, friend.”
“Maybe I love you too much? Happiness—that’s a sofa-pillow noise, a nothing word. I haven’t a word for what I wish I could say. Only six months I’ve known you, and now I can’t imagine trying to get along without you.”
“I won’t leave you. All the same, it’s for me to show you how you could get along, and enjoy living too, if anything ever took me away. The Greeks understood that, though not quite as well as the writers of the modern book.”
“I know—I suppose I know. Is it too soon to start thinking about founding a new continuum?—with Nora I hope, if she still likes us that much when the time comes, and maybe some other girl? After you have the doctorate? I wouldn’t care where. I like to think of you designing a house for it.”
“It’s not too soon. I have it always in the back of my mind. Do you like the plan of the ten-year interval between additions of new members?”
“Ten—we start in the twenties, that makes a five-mother continuum by the time we’re in the sixties. Yes, that’s all right, Andrei. My family’s a nine-mother—five year intervals. Too large, really. When I was small, I used to feel there were too many people around, though I didn’t mind it as soon as I was big enough to enjoy working on our farm. We had a herd of those little cattle. White-Polls, that originated somewhere in Main—nice little things, only about half again the size of goats. A five-mother—ten to thirteen adults, plus the old, yes, that’s plenty. With about a hundred hectares, I don’t care where. I heard Government is about to open more islands in the Lorenta for new families. Might be good.”
“We’ll think in those terms. Ah, the prose—yes, you do gibbon along. It’s not bad.”
“Mahew will snort.”
“You mean that literary flight with the suicide parallel? I question that, too, Elmo—because suicide is after all an act of will, however morbid, and I don’t think the people of the fiftieth century had a true will to die. They painted themselves into a comer and stood there whimpering. I believe they just blundered, made a thousand blunders, but without the—the foolish dignity of an act of self-destruction. . . . Something was bothering you a few minutes ago.”
“I knew of someone who killed herself, way back when I was seven. Not in our continuum, but people we knew. Sometimes it rises up at me even now, I don’t understand why. Casts a long shadow.”
“Tell me of it some time soon.”
“I will, Eudaimon.”
“And so back to work, Hunnington.” Andrei kissed the top of his head and returned to his own desk. His face was hidden for a while, in one of his times of stillness. Then his pencil was moving once again, and Elmo’s pen took up its labors:
Whether the exchange of a dozen or so fission and fusion bombs between the Eastern and Western Hemispheres was the result of an accident or in response to rumors of aggressive action of some sort may never be known. In the historical perspective, it is clear that the mere possession of these ghastly toys, in a deadly balance of tension between the two halves of an idiotically divided world, was enough to render it certain that sooner or later the things would be discharged. The fiftieth century appears to have felt no more respect for the laws of probabilities than a monkey with a box of matches.
The toys were indeed exploded. Moscow and Washington ceased to exist. The bomb intended for a direct hit on New York was a miss, devastating the central portion of what was known as Long Island, now mostly under water. In the incredible city were many survivors, and enough of its physical structure remained, awaiting the mercies of decay and inundation and the long labor of the tides, so that today the Black Rocks offer some interest to visitors from distant regions.
About a dozen other major cities are known to have been annihilated, including Leningrad, Detroit, Paris, Liverpool, and Peiping. It is estimated, though this can only be a searching guess (Snokes, Cultural Panorama, Ch. VII, §4), that from approximately four billion, the world’s population was cut to about nine hundred million within a few weeks after the Twenty-Minute War (4996), more than two-thirds of the deaths being due to radiation sickness, violence, and starvation. A high proportion of these survivors were of course crippled or sterile or soon to die from other causes. Thus the originators of atomic weaponry, if any of them survived, might well have claimed that the experience was an outstanding success.
They may even be held somewhat responsible (Ingmon, Artifacts and Records of the 51st Century at Old St. Louis, Nupal Press, 5682, pp. 21-26) for many of the deaths attributed to the Red Plague fifteen or twenty years later. The garbled and superstition-ridden accounts of this calamity often suggest either a delayed action of radiation sickness or the effect of some viral or bacterial agency working on organisms too weakened to resist. The description of bright red petechiae, bone decay, mental disintegration, and rotting flesh are suggestive.
There were, it is true, other population-reducing factors at work. According to Willan’s History of Agriculture, Ch. Ill, by about 4990 so much of the agricultural land of the globe had been so impoverished and corrupted by the ludicrous processes of poison-farming that all harvests were sharply diminishing and their quality worsening at a rate that alarmed even the experts. Probably the urban swarms would have expired in mass famines if the Twenty-Minute War had not done its work. And a further toll was taken, day after day and year after year, by respiratory diseases caused by the widening smog (known chokingly to fiftieth century wits—there were some!—as “Detroit mist”), which did not clear away until the fifty-second century. This abomination could have been prevented at any time during the middle of the fiftieth century by the development of rationally designed power sources in place of the internal combustion engine; but the latter was more readily exploitable, and the oil and automobile industries had swollen into monsters, which, like the Moloch of Carthage, must have their pleasures and be fed. Some lingering smog may have been noticed as late as the fifty-fourth century, for Elmo stepped over to the bookcase beside Nora’s desk, plucked a volume, and stood on one leg, reading, raising and lowering himself on the flexing arch of his foot, a mannerism adopted from Andrei, who said it was good for the ills of man or beast or freshman.
might not the curious line in Barr Wain’s Siege of Shattum, “The healing luster of a healing sky,” refer to something more than dispersal of smoke from the air after the burning of Shattum?
However, with all reasonable allowance for such ancillary factors of destruction
“Andrei.”
“Urn?”
“I got in ancillary, Mahew’s own darling ancillary.”
“Bless you, my child.”
it would seem that the grand advancement of atomic science in the fiftieth century—in the abstract, one of the mightiest achievements of human intelligence—was also the principal reason why the world’s population about a hundred years later had sunk to approximately one hundred million (Snokes, loc. cit., p. 321 seq.), a weight of humanity which has not been greatly exceeded since, and which is perhaps not too severe for the slowly recovering planet to bear.
“Andrei, Eudaimon.”
“Um-hum.”
“I got in loc. cit. and seq.”
“Dear golden warrior.”
Thus what might have been achieved by
reason and restraint was brought about instead by blundering, folly, and the idiot misuse of great discoveries, at the cost of unmeasurable suffering, the depletion of irreplaceable resources, and a most needless lapse into some seven hundred years of barbarism.
Nora wandered in singing her contralto part in a Dowland madrigal:
Tosse not my soule, I love twixt hope and fear—
Elmo came in where he belonged, only just in time:
—twixt hope and feare,
Shew me some ground where I may firmly stand,
Or surely fallr—
“O my Elmo, dear little yellow-haired gosling, the tenors stank! As I knew they would, especially in your lamented absence. Elmo, they phthstank! Even Jo Lamoy had a cold in the head, but came in hooting and useless from some grim sense of duty, poor darling. And by the way, Dr. Luma has changed his mind again about the other Dowland thing—What If I Never Speede—it’s in the heaven-moment, or so I call it, the come-come-come part. First, he’s having Marget take the little soprano notes solo—wow, she can do it! Second change, he wants her to dominate that passage the first time round, the rest of us an echo; then on the repeat reverse it, and she’s the echo. What a beautiful old man it is! He confided to us he’s finished another string quartet, the seventh in forty years. You missed a happy rehearsal, except for the moments when the tenors clonked, and Dr. Luna has grown as hardened to that as anyone ever can. And so you’ll remember, my small baa-lamb, and not foghorn forth until the repeat?”
“If I seize her, Andrei, will you paddle?”
“I must give it thought. Ever notice how the women we love best are often the same ones who start shedding clothes the moment they enter a room?”
“It’s the mark of a sunny, hopeful nature,” said Elmo. “She never remembers where she dropped them, but she always thinks she will.”
But if she will pitie my desire,
and my love requite,
Then ever shall shee live my deare delight.
Come, come, come,
while I have a heart to desire thee.
“Can you catch her, Andrei? Too fast for me, and besides, I’m sitting down.”
“I must give it thought.”
Come, come, come,
for I will either love or admire thee
She kissed both in passing and was gone in music to the bedroom. After a while Elmo lifted his drowsy head. “Andrei.”
“Ahoy.”
“Got 1308 words already, god damn, leaving room for 692 on cultural development and stuff.”
“So culture takes a screwing, not for the first time. Toil on.”
In music and the visual arts, the fiftieth century was a time of sharp decline, filled with a sense of despair, a feeling—appropriate perhaps in an age when science was worshiped by the non-scientific instead of viewed in proportion—that all the traditional resources of art and music had been exhausted, and that therefore (odd reasoning) nothing remained to do but jettison the past and seek new thrills or perish. It seems to have occurred to very few that the subject matter of art is infinite. This reneging, this despair, itself no more than a confession of artistic sterility, was. complicated by a haunting delusion that the concept of progress must somehow be applied to the arts, where it has always been irrelevant.
Important music was written in the early part of the century. Mahler and Sibelius are enjoyed and venerated today with the masters of the preceding age. But from the later decades only the work of Britten and two or three others possessed the quality that won survival. The rest was panic art, or twittering.
Understandably, almost no paintings remain from the period; indeed it seems that many fiftieth century painters were (mercifully) indifferent to the survival of their materials. But from printed reproductions that have been preserved, some opinion may be formed. It was mainly an art of mental exhaustion, bankruptcy of invention, and triviality of insight, of experiment degenerated into experimentalism; and one reads (Ingmon, loc. cit.) how rapidly fashions shifted in the visual arts, how quickly each cult that believed itself to be avant-garde ossified into one more establishment. Still, it was not all pop and Picasso-worship: serious work continued, and even won occasional recognition before 4990 when the dark came down on everything. A few marbles survive for us, done with awareness of the ages. One also reads of fiftieth century ironware sculpture being broken down (with due precautions against witchcraft) to make spear- and arrow-heads for fifty-second century hunters and nomads. Perhaps no age has ever wholly given itself over to trash and dull thinking.
Elmo moaned. “Three hundred forty-five words to go, which must include literature and something to confuse old Mahew into believing I have, ho-ho, historical perspective—but, balls of Zeus, Andrei, I will have, some time. This paper’s making me want to be a historian—I’d thought I was losing that. I really want it—Jasus, what a long road!”
“Long and twisty and I’m convinced you’ll make it. Well, you might point out that the decline and death of the novel, lovingly announced about 2437 times in fiftieth century criticism, has not yet taken place.”
“Hoy, thanks. I can wriggle that in.”
“And Elmo: goodly, portly, learned Dr. Mahew is not about to count words. Also, if he did, he would be no-way displeased by a word count of two thousand and one.”
“I know. I’m a nitpicker, a goof, a slob.”
Andrei came over to him. “None of those things, friend. You’re tired. Why not finish tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow, Math and Comp and Hist-Sci—besides, I want to get this monster out of the way. I’m booming. A fireball, a genius.”
“Wouldn’t surprise me. I’m going to bed—Nora’s lonesome. Don’t work too late, or we’ll have to pry you up in the morning.”
“No, I won’t. Be with you soon. . . . Eudaimon—”
“Communicate, bright spirit.”
“Leave me space on your side of the bed.”
“Without fail, Companion.”
The case of literature seemed a little more hopeful in the decades before the last war and collapse. Amid despair, weariness of spirit, military domination, political corruption carried to the point of nausea, disenchantment with a dream of progress, which had become little better than a pushing and shoving for fraudulent material comforts, and disillusion with revolutions, which did nothing but turn misery the other side up, a search for sustaining cultural and moral values still was pursued in many idioms, such as no previous age had ever felt compelled to carry on. Individuals of other ages had questioned and wondered and explored, struggled against outrageous odds to improve the human condition.
But the search of the fiftieth century seems to have tried to reach down into the very heartlands of the human spirit.
Sometimes it appeared that the supposed lesser functions of literature, such as entertainment and appeals to the aesthetic life, were to be smothered by these heavy labors, but it never quite happened. The handful of writers whose work has survived knew, as Homer and Shakespeare knew, that human beings learn best when the learning is also entertainment for its own sake. This should explain why the death of the novel, so often celebrated with crocodile gulps by critics of the fiftieth century, has not yet occurred.
For some warm moments Elmo was distracted and pleased by the music of Nora chuckling at some words of Andrei’s too soft to be distinguished. Then she was moaning in desire, and crying out, and after long sighing quiet, content. Elmo drowsed and daydreamed, rolling the ebony pen in his fingers to catch the fight in beauty.
What is historical perspective? Looking across eight hundred years, may we wonder what the people of the fiftieth century thought when they gazed backward the same distance in time to the harsh century of the Crusades?—for they knew their history, those people of the fiftieth; they never had the excuse of not knowing the warning signals of history. They must have congratulated themselves, staring at that time—leprosy, the Inquisition, plague, serfdom, poverty, the most atrocious physical cruelties tak
en as a matter of course, a part of the day’s entertainments. And the congratulation was justifiable: they had come a long way, in certain respects, from the stink of medieval cities, the heretic-burnings, the Siege of Jerusalem. Vicious cruelties they still practiced, in war and peace, but conscience often stirred.
They no longer wallowed and rejoiced in savagery. Rather they tried to look away, or sweep the dirt under the rug; and when this could not be done, they attempted fumbling remedies. A small, poor step, but maybe not too contemptible a step for humanity, considering the shortness of eight hundred years.
If they had not foresight in spite of all their prophets, we need not blame them for not being superhuman.
And the boy was appalled by the length of the road, the grandeur of the task. Nearly six thousand years of recorded history, and l am to explore it deeply enough to say something of value before the end of my life? Oh—
Momentarily (knowing the upsurge of strength would soon arrive), Elmo was unbearably tired and rested his eyes on the palms of his hands. The finely fitted oak floors of Jermyn Hall don’t creak. He was not aware of Andrei’s coming until he felt his friend’s hand on his shoulder and heard a sliding of paper.
“Two thousand and seventy-seven words, give or take a dozen. No particular bloody good, Andrei, though he’ll give me a blossoming A.”
“Hush! I’m reading it. . . . It’s bad, Elmo, only by contrast with what you’ll be writing fifteen-twenty years from now. For what it is, I salute you. Good man, this Hunnington.”
“Satis est. By the way, I’m writing home for ten bucks, with confession. She must have that Chaucer.”
“Again salute, and how about a run down to the beach? Moon’s up.”
“Ahoy, ahoy! Nora coming?”
“No, sleeping like a babe in silk. This is for us. I’ll give you a three-yard handicap.”
“You’ll do nothing of the kind. Starting here!” He was down the stairs and out on the open grass and running for the delight of it through moonlight in pure and tranquil air, running for youth and because no road was too long. He soon heard the moving stir of sea on sand where the tide was riding in, and his feet entered the sweet shock of the breakers when Andrei caught him in his arms.