Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -… [2244]

“You’re so young,” he said. “It seems almost criminal that you should be so young in these terrible times. I wish you could have known this country when it was still salvageable.” … “Human beings will survive of course. Some other countries will survive. Maybe they’ll absorb what’s left of us. Or maybe we’ll just break up into a lot of little states quarreling and fighting with each other over whatever crumbs are left. That’s almost happened now with states shutting themselves off from one another, treating state lines as national borders. As bright as you are, I don’t think you understand—I don’t think you can understand what we’ve lost. Perhaps that’s a blessing.” — , Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -…, 2244

Note

Craft: the elegy is delivered entirely in second-person address to a girl who has no memory of the country being mourned — Butler routes the grief through the very person who cannot receive it, which is what makes ‘Perhaps that’s a blessing’ land as consolation and wound at once. The list of collapse moves in scale from ‘human beings’ down to ‘crumbs,’ and the essayistic evenness of the syntax (‘Maybe they’ll… Or maybe we’ll…’) enacts the exhaustion it describes.