The future is now
Circa 1950, Katherine Anne Porter read a magazine article about what someone should do “if and when we see that flash brighter than the sun which means the atom bomb had arrived.” She was disappointed when “the advice dwindled to this: The only real safety seems to lie in simply being somewhere else at the time, the farther away the better …”
The point being that if you are close enough to see the flash brighter than the sun, then it is already too late for you. It might be better to hope that you are near enough ground zero to be instantly incinerated rather than have to deal with the lingering effects of nuclear poisoning.
In response to the article, Porter wrote an essay that was to become rather famous called “The Future is Now.” It was first published in Mademoiselle, primarily a fashion magazine, though in 1950 a fashion magazine might still publish short stories by the likes of Tennessee Williams, William Faulkner, James Baldwin and Flannery O’Connor.
Sylvia Plath would serve as a guest editor of the magazine in 1953 as part of her prize for winning the magazine’s fiction contest the year before. In February 1954, the magazine published an abridged script to Dylan Thomas’ radio drama “Under Milk Wood.”
And while we tend to romanticize the ’50s these days—facile nostalgia posits a “Happy Days”-style America brimming with post-war exuberance and the innocence—the world had just seen the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
We understood we possessed the means for our own destruction, and one of the chief lessons of history is that if a switch exists it will one day be flipped. In 1950, smart people thought a nuclear holocaust was inevitable, that it was only a matter of time before flashes brighter than the sun began to appear in skies everywhere.
Porter sensed the existential angst that was seeping into the collective consciousness, a despair that collapsed into futility. What’s the use of doing anything if all our enterprise, all our art and vessels of meaning were destined to be wiped away in one white-hot instant?
In her essay, Porter notes that she could see from her Manhattan apartment across the way into another building where she watched “a young man in a white T-shirt and white shorts at work polishing a long, beautiful dark table top. It was obviously his own table in his own flat, and he was enjoying his occupation. He was bent over in perfect concentration, rubbing, sandpapering, running the flat of his palm over the surface, standing back now and then to get the sheen of light on the fine wood.”
Porter writes that she stood “admiring his workmanlike devotion to a good job worth doing” when she suddenly felt the utter waste of his effort. What good was it that he lavished so much “effort and energy” on a table that ultimately would offer scant protection were he to crawl under it in the event of a nuclear attack? “Any sort of old board would do.”
But then she began to think about other things. She looked down and saw a couple strolling arm in arm.
“I believe this custom of lovers walking enwreathed in public was imported by our soldiers of the First World War from France, from Paris indeed. ‘You didn’t see that sort of thing here before,’ certain members of the older generation were heard to remark quite often, in a tone of voice.
Well, one sees quite a lot of it now, and it is a very pretty, reassuring sight.”
She saw other people, of all ages and types, bustling about, and traffic zooming around, and she felt consoled.
“The silence of the spaces between the stars does not affright me, as it did Pascal, because I am unable to imagine it except poetically,” Porter writes, “and my awe is not for the silence and space of the endless universe but for the inspired imagination of man, who can think and feel so, and turn a phrase like that to communicate it to us. Then too, I like the kind of honesty and directness of the young soldier who lately answered someone who asked him if he knew what he was fighting for. ‘I sure do,’ he said, ‘I am fighting to live.’
“So I glanced again at the young man at work … he was restoring a beautiful surface to put his books and papers on, to serve his plates from, to hold his cocktail tray and his lamp. He was full of the deep, right, instinctive, human belief that he and the table were going to be around together for a long time. Even if he is off to the army next week, it will be there when he gets back. At the very least, he is doing something he feels is worth doing now, and that is no small thing.”
Other worries have overtaken our fear of the sun erupting in the sky; the duck-and-cover drills of the ’50s and ’60s seem quaint beside the active-shooter drills school children these days endure. There is plenty of reason for pessimism, as our world seems to simultaneously grow more stupid (in 1950, Porter could allude to 17th-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal in an essay in a fashion magazine with a general audience) and more intensely involuted.
We are aware of millions of dumb ways to die, and a few scenarios in which we might obliterate ourselves in a few centuries or decades.
Porter argues that the creation of the atomic bomb was inevitable and that its deployment is only another order of mass murder. Murder is in our nature; “What would you have advised instead? That the human race should have gone on sitting in caves gnawing raw meat and beating each other over the head with the bones?”
But she ends on a hopeful note: “And yet it may be that what we have is a world not on the verge of flying apart, but an uncreated one—still in shapeless fragments waiting to be put together properly. I imagine that when we want something better, we may have it, at perhaps no greater price than we have already paid for the worse.”
I don’t know about that. I think we, as a species, might be out of chances.
Yet we persist, most of us, because we possess imagination and curiosity enough to want to know what comes next. To experience the next warm chocolate chip cookie, the next baseball season, the next dream. The next unwritten moment, which is all that really matters, the ongoing eternal opportunity to do something worthy, to fight to live.