“Only the greatest miracle the world has to offer,” Roxy said, giving her husband a big hug.
At other times, Sarah would have offered up a quotation to suit the occasion. But she realized—as did we all—that there were no words eloquent enough for this moment in our lives.
FROM THE JOURNAL OF WILSON HARDY, JR.
It is Christmas Eve, December 24, 2010, and the Engineering Village Carolers are wending their way along the lakeshore, singing that music which has such an eternal grip upon our hearts. Mary, Roxy, and Sarah are among the group, and I fancy that I hear their voices stand out sweetly above the others. Of course, this is my imagination; the more than twenty-five voices blend together. Indeed, all day my senses have been in overdrive. Am I living a fantasy? Here it is, the end of December, and we are entering the heart of the summer. I don’t believe I will ever get used to celebrating Christmas in the summer.
Celebrating? Joyful and triumphant? Is that what we are, one year after the destruction of seven billion people and civilizations that took thousands of years to create?
If there were any desperate hopes that Jane Demming Warner’s scenario of doom was overly bleak, they are now—a year later—pretty well dissipated. More than four and a half months have passed since the sailing of the
Yes, ashes to ashes. That is an expression we use for individual living creatures, but never expected would pertain to everything on the face of the earth. With each passing day it looks more and more as if the renewal of civilization depends solely upon what we do here in the Ulundi Circle. As Sarah said just the other night: “To the question, ‘Will we survive?’ must be added another, ‘If we are the only survivors, will we be worthy?’”
The music is achingly beautiful. But joy? Mary says it’s a matter of faith.
Tom says that faith is fine if it helps you; but even without it, there are things about which to be joyful. And sometimes I have to agree with him. In just one year, the industrial enterprise has made phenomenal headway. Screw-ups? Confusion? Failures? Oh, yes, plenty, as I discover almost every day at various committee meetings. But priorities are adjusted, people are reassigned, plans are redrawn, and progress resumes. They say that a steam engine is almost ready for testing. An ugly brute, by all accounts, made of low-grade materials. But it is expected to work, the first of many that will be replacing the primitive waterwheels that have been driving our sawmills, gristmills, and bellows for the smelting furnaces.
We are enjoying a second summer of ideal weather and bountiful crops. The sheep and cattle were blessedly fertile. Lucky animals: they have no philosophical qualms about how to rebuild the world.
With the weather so fine, and serviceable farm tools now in ample supply, many of the people who were working the fields are being reassigned to food-processing activities. We can look forward to a cornucopia of cheese, baked goods, salad oils, and other delicacies. At the same time, the Joint Planning Subcommittee has mandated that salting, pickling, drying, and other preservative activities be intensified. They insist upon conservative planning for the future, an approach that is greeted with universal approval.
School programs, which understandably took a while to get organized, are now running full tilt. No talk of summer vacations around the Ulundi Circle. The children are anxious to learn. Distracted on occasion, and ornery too, of course; but basically anxious to learn. The teachers are knowledgeable and anxious to teach. Given these transcendent realities, the shortage of texts and supplies becomes a minor consideration.
Higher education is handled in an apprentice arrangement, often with a mentor-disciple ratio of one to one. What university students—and faculty—would not be exhilarated by such an opportunity?
Gratifying improvements. Yet, joy to the world?
Last evening, we held a pre-Christmas meeting of the Focus Group, and inevitably the discussion turned to matters spiritual. Of course, the holiday is not totally religious, as we know from past years. The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York City always ended with a Santa Claus float, heralding the start of the serious shopping season.
Nevertheless, after the cynics have had their say, there is still something special about Christmas. Even in the hot and humid climate of a South African summer evening, we felt familiar stirrings of anticipation—tinged, of course, with the ever-recurring regrets which are the backdrop to our days.
Mary, predictably, tried to focus our attention on the traditional holy message of Christmas: faith, hope for the future, and salvation.
I asked the obvious question: “So why wasn’t the world saved?”
And she gave the obvious answer: “The nature of salvation is beyond the ken of human reason.”
This proposition brought us, in short order, to a conversational dead end.
So we started to talk about Christmas music, Christmas in the movies, and Christmases of our childhood— trees, sleds, parties, and snowstorms. Sarah tried to recreate, with the rest of us chiming in, the storyline of
Eventually, we found ourselves revisiting the theme of universal destruction, the possible ways in which we could come to grips with the catastrophe intellectually, philosophically, and emotionally.
Roxy reflected on the notion of punishment from above. “I am more convinced, as time goes by, that so- called civilized people brought the destruction upon themselves—maybe I should say
“I can’t agree,” Sarah countered, “that society became less moral. You could argue to the contrary: what with civil rights, in-creased concern for the poor, and mainly the victories of democracy over despotism. That doesn’t mean we didn’t anger the gods. Having spent these many months among technical types”—she looked at Tom and me with affection, despite her words—“well, I have some new ideas about what might constitute the offense against heaven. I never realized before how deeply science had penetrated the physical mysteries of the universe. And I don’t mean just Prometheus learning the secret of fire. We snatched metals from the earth, mastered electricity, deciphered the atom, and had begun to manipulate human genes. Doesn’t this begin to threaten the supremacy of the Deity—or deities?”
“I don’t think that’s the problem,” Roxy countered. “In my view, God doesn’t resent people for being smart, only for being nasty.” She picked up the Bible that Mary had brought to the meeting, and flipped through the early pages of Genesis until she came to the story of Noah.
“Here it is,” she said. “‘And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart. And the Lord said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth…’ But Noah was spared, and why? Because ‘Noah was a just man… and Noah walked with God.’”
