Mister Leibowitz

I read A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller Jr. years ago. It made pretty good sense given the times. We were still living in a polarized world, Axis and the Allies, East and West, the Soviet camp and the USA camp. I heard it first as a radio play and then read it. I still quote, paraphrase, from it occasionally. (Before I start this I really should reread this but I will not.) The central circumstance was nuclear war but the story starts well after the war. The nuclear war was central to the story but the sort of disruption to human culture was secondary. It occurred to me while listening to the news recently that the kind catastrophe of this story could easily be replaced by rising sea levels. Some years ago I made the comment that our demise, human kind, might not be the big event. but a gradual decline and disappearance, maybe (turning into) a race of beings their ancestors would not recognize, the sort of thing that seems to be the way of this world but difficult to contemplate. I believe he referenced T.S. Eliot and made a remark about with a whimper not a bang. A poem I should, I suppose, read.

The Hollow Men
T. S. Eliot
Mistah Kurtz—he dead.

A penny for the Old Guy

  I
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us—if at all—not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

  II
Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death’s dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind’s singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer
In death’s dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat’s coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer—

Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom

  III
This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man’s hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this
In death’s other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.

  IV
The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death’s twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.

  V
Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o’clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
                     For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
                     Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
                     For Thine is the Kingdom
For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

Now I have and seems not on topic.

But none the less I could borrow the phrase. No I will not.

In any case the rising seas could be substituted for the nuclear war to good effect: rising seas, war and famine as the world deals with contracting ability of the earth to support human culture.

Let us suppose the seas fully rise by 2200 and that world population has shrunk to a billion after having risen to ten billion by 2100. The world population would shrink by ninety million a year for the years from 2100 to 2200, a 2.3 percent steady decline.

The end of human culture seemed so distant at one time. I am trying to find a way or at least a way of thinking about it that has pleasant outcomes. Will it be a chaotic descent into extinction or can humanity find a way to survive, survival is not everything but not surviving is liking trying to think of the thing nothing, the perfect thought, nothing, still leaves the thinker thiinking of thing nothing, or can a grand life be found that is less great. It will after all be a great watery planet with new beach front property.