As we make our way through such turbulent times I am reminded that we have always endured as a species no matter what... my thoughts and prayers to all those in Afghanistan suffering right now.
“On Living in an Atomic Age”
(first published 1948)
by C. S. Lewis (1898–1963)
From: Present Concerns: Essays by C.S. Lewis (edited by Walter Hooper; New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), pages 73–80.
In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. “How are we to
live in an atomic age?” I am tempted to reply: “Why, as you would have lived in
the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you
would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and
cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer,
an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway
accidents, an age of motor accidents.”
In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation.
Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already
sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high
percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways. We had, indeed, one very
great advantage over our ancestors — anesthetics; but we have that still. It is
perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the
scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world
which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a
chance at all, but a certainty.
This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull
ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that
bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things praying, working,
teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting
to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like
frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a
microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.
“But,” you will reply, “it is not death — not even painful and premature death
— that we are bothering about. Of course the chance of that is not new. What is
new is that the atomic bomb may finally and totally destroy civilization itself. The
lights may be put out for ever.”
