ON THE BEACH

At the height of the cold war, most unsettling of all was perhaps the military/political strategy of Manual Assured Destruction, or MAD. Reflecting the feeling of the day, Barry McGuire's 1965 guttural rock song, "Eve of Destruction," warned "if the button is pushed, there's no running away / There'll be no one to save with the world in a grave." What happened to the savior of old? He died. In like manner, the characters of Nevil Shute's 1967 novel, 'On the Beach,' struggle to find meaning in a world made meaningless after total nuclear war results in a slow but ineluctable end of life. If there is no next year, what will you do tomorrow? Oddly, the characters continue to work and love and live in the face of imminent death for a future that will not come. The American captain of the submarine 'Scorpion ,' observing Australia as the last outpost of survivors, discovers from one of them that she is taking shorthand, typing, and bookkeeping classes. "I'll be able to get a good job next year." She expalins, knowing that there is ot going to be a next year. "It's the same at the university. There are many more enrollments now than there were a few months ago." Why? What else is there to do but to pretend that the world has meaning? After all (and this was one of the deeper messages of the book), what Shute's doomed survivors face is what all of us face; the only difference is that we do not know how or when our end will come, so then fiction of purpose is preserved. The Epigraph from T.S. Eliot on the title page of Shute's book expresses this poetically:

"In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river...
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but with whimper.

~ Page 18