Samuel Florman: The Aftermath

Roxy pursed her lips and looked intently at the book in her hands. “So Noah built the ark as he was directed to do, and then the Lord said to him, ‘Come thou and all thy house into the ark; for thee have I seen righteous before me in this generation.’” She put down the book with satisfaction, and addressed us as if she were delivering a sermon: “The man was saved because he was just and righteous. It had nothing to do with intelligence or lack of it. And, of course, the animals were saved because—well, just because they deserved to be saved.”

“But, sweetheart,” Herb said, “how about the rainbow? How about the covenant that God made with Noah that this wouldn’t happen again? Let me see that book.”

Roxy showed him where she had been reading, and in a moment, Herb spoke out with a tone of challenge in his voice: “Here it is: ‘And the Lord said in his heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for man’s sake… While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.’ “

“It seems to me,” I said, “that implicit in the covenant is the understanding that humankind will not go back to evil ways.”

“Or maybe,” Sarah said, “God couldn’t help Himself. Maybe He doesn’t control comets that come from far, far out in space, from—what’s it called, the Oort cloud?”

“Or maybe,” Tom said, “God never made the promise at all, and it was simply imagined by the guy who wrote the Noah story. After all, what we’re talking about is a story, and the plot is probably based on some historical catastrophe.”

Mary reached over, picked up her Bible, and said, “Listen you guys. In the true spirit of Christmas, I forgive you the blasphemy of playing wordgames with the Holy Book.”

“Well, dearest Mary,” Tom said, “if you’re dispensing forgiveness, then let me tell you what I really think. I believe that the gods—with a small ‘g’—or the devils, or the fates, have been playing a little game. I’ve thought about this a lot in the past year, and there’s no other way to explain it. Just consider.”

“Uh-oh,” Herb exclaimed. “Mary, cover your ears.”

“Maybe we ought to write this down,” Sarah said, smiling. “ A new version of the Apocalypse.”

“No, bear with me,” Tom continued. “The world is destroyed on Christmas Day, except for a small region containing a relatively small number of people. Not one righteous man like Noah, mind you, with his family and a bunch of animals; but a community just about large enough to embark on restoring an advanced civilization with a technological base. The spared population consists of proven pragmatists with many talents, and outstanding survival skills; and the land which they call home has most of the natural resources one could want. Into their midst sails a ship containing six hundred of the most proficient and knowledgeable engineers in the world, along with their textbooks, handbooks, notebooks, and up-to-the-minute plans. Also families and crew, people of many talents—mechanical, scientific, medical—plus other endowments having little or nothing to do with the sciences.

“Between the natives and the people aboard ship—the Inlanders and the Outlanders—practically all the races of the world are represented. Granted, there should be, by proportion, more Asians.

But, after all, every game has its rules, and in this one the world, as it exists, is a given. If the story took place in Asia, there would be hardly any non-Asians. That wouldn’t do. At least in KwaZulu Natal, there are blacks and whites, and an astonishingly large number of people who hail from the Indian subcontinent. And, as partial compensation for the lack of Asians in the local population, remember that aboard the ship they are very well represented. This is so because Asians are prominent in the engineering profession, and also because they serve on crews in many oceangoing ships. And, who knows, perhaps Gordon Chan is right in his conjecture that there is a circle of survival somewhere on the Chinese mainland.

“Anyhow, there you have it. The game is all laid out and ready to play. Once before, human beings, extraordinary creatures, went from the Stone Age to high technology in six thousand years. Let’s see if they can do it again, only faster. We’ll put them back in the Stone Age—the way that General LeMay suggested the United States do to Vietnam—but leave them most of their accumulated knowledge. What will happen? Isn’t it fun to speculate? Place your bets, fellow deities. Ready, set, go! Can anybody offer another theory that makes more sense?”

After a few moments of silence, Sarah spoke up. “Well,” she said, “if you want to let your imagination run wild, I have a better idea. Suppose we’ve all been bopped on the head, like the hero of Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee, or the narrator in Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward. In that case, everything we’ve lived through has been a dream, and soon we will awaken.”

“A year is an awfully long time for a dream,” Tom said.

“Besides,” I said, “I’ve been dreaming a lot lately. Is it possible to have dreams within a dream?” What I didn’t say was that most of my dreams have been about Queen Ranavolana. Danger, mystery, ineffable beauty, and enigmatic evil—that red-sailed ship represents everything that lies beyond my everyday world and well-ordered conscious thoughts. I have a feeling that I knew of its existence before I ever saw it and that I will dream of it forever. But all I said was, “Dreams within dreams? It hardly seems likely.”

Tom ignored my musing, and returned to his hypothesis of a game conceived by the gods. “The thing I really like about my idea,” he said, “is that while the gods think they’ve made up a game for their own amusement, the truth is they’ve made up a fascinating game for us. Start from ground zero and see what you can accomplish. The challenge is posed, and it is up to us to meet it. Meeting a challenge is what makes us feel most alive—at least that’s true for the engineers amongst us.”

“That’s just dandy,” Herb said. “Are you saying that the gods did the engineers a favor by destroying the world? And they did it on Christmas Day? What a lovely present. And how about the rest of us, who could do very nicely without so much challenge?”

“Well, honey,” Roxy said, “it is true for everyone that your challenger, your adversary even, can be your best friend. That’s like the Zen view of tennis. I read it once in a book. By making things difficult for you, your opponent brings out the best that is in you, and therefore does you the kindest possible favor.”

“That reminds me of Sisyphus,” I said, “condemned to roll a heavy boulder up a hill, only to see it fall back to the bottom each time he reaches the summit.” Then to Sarah, “Didn’t you tell me about a philosopher who said that we have to imagine Sisyphus as happy?”

“That was Albert Camus,” Sarah said.

“And, by the way,” I asked, “what great sin was Sisyphus supposed to have committed?”

“According to the myth,” Sarah said, “he cheated Death by craftily chaining him up. So nobody died until Death was freed by Ares, the god of war. The gods were not amused.”

“That’s a pretty good story,” Tom said. “And that’s certainly one of the things that engineers try to do—cheat Death, so to speak, by helping people live in a better, safer, more comfortable world.”

“At the same time that they help War do his awful work,” Roxy said.

“Okay,” Herb interjected, “we can weave our pretty stories, and show how clever we are. But the life we’re living is neither a dream nor a game contrived in heaven. We’ve been tested all right—to the limit and beyond. And we can’t be sure that we’ve seen the last of our trials. What if another comet strikes tomorrow, or earthquake, or flood, or plague? Or how about an invasion by aliens? What if it is our lot to be tormented forever?”