thisnewday

In the bookstore, tonight, I was thumbing aimlessly through the shelves of fiction and came across The Dog Stars by Peter Heller. I guess I noticed it because the front cover, instead of the binding, was facing outward from the shelf and on it was a solitary aircraft flying high up, against a sky of dark blue.

I was so hooked by the cover art that I picked it up to read the notes on the back. Turns out it's one of those post-apocalyptic-dystopian-after-the-fall pieces of fiction that surface from time to time over pretty much the entire history of English literature.

Except that, as I'm driving home tonight, I'm thinking about what's going on in Japan where thousands are presumed dead in the wake of an oceanquake-generated tsunami and the government has declared a nuclear emergency at two of its coastal power plants. The horror is that, even with tens of thousands already dead, the focus of the world's attention has been rivetted to the fate of these two plants, one of which seems to be approaching meltdown.

Having grown up in the Cold War era, when dads were digging fallout shelters in neighborhood backyards and the spectre of nuclear holocaust was made starkly real to schoolchildren taking shelter in school basements and under desks, it occurs to me that we may now be witnessing the fulfillment of Eliot's prophesy of a world that ends, "not with a bang but a whimper..."

Anyway, I didn't buy the book because, if I'm gonna be in the movie anyway, I don't need to read the book. And I also know that in a few hours I'm gonna be working with kids who need whatever we can give them in order to survive in the world as it now is. Which is all I can do and the best I can do...

LPK
LiveJournal
3.12.2011