In 1948 ,C.S. Lewis wrote an essay titled, “On Living in an Atomic Age.” This short excerpt from that piece is one I believe many will find startlingly trenchant to the tone of world politics in 2022. I was actually born in ’48, making me a leading-edge Boomer, and I have vivid memories of the omnipresent fear that dominated even my pre-adolescent mind. I wish I’d found Lewis’ essay back then, but we lived, prospered, loved, made babies, enjoyed some FREAKING AWESOME music, and did all the things associated with living.
If the bomb comes, let it “…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.”
We may or may not dodge that humongous stinking bullet again, but it doesn’t really matter, now, does it?
“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.” — On Living in an Atomic Age, 1948
Here’s a link to the whole thing. https://reopenbucks.com/atomic/
Wess Rodgers – Rebsarge.wordpress.com – Albuquerque
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