The atomic age.
This is a post from the archives of the “On Butter Hill” Substack newsletter. In an effort to streamline our online presence, I will be reposting our Substack posts here on our blog while gradually dissolving our posts there.
I’m never so grateful for the farm as when the world is falling apart.
I can barely stand to open my phone these days. The farm remains a steady assessment of time passing, something reliable in its unpredictability. Not in an afraid sense, but in a sense of “how much milk will the cow give today?” and “I wonder if the pigs have finally been bred this time…” The practical comings and goings which comfort and remind the farm’s steward that life will very much remain the same, should we allow for ourselves to remain on farm time.
I don’t have much to share today, aside from a passage that I refer to frequently when the news is deafeningly horrifying. I hope you find comfort in these words as I do, remembering the scholars of old dealt with things much the same, perhaps worse than they say, yet wielded hope amidst it all.
From C.S. Lewis “On Living in an Atomic Age”
First published in 1948
“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.”
I hope this word brings you the encouragement it does me. May you be found doing human things today, and every day.
In hope,
