Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -… [456]

“Live!” Dad said. “That’s all anybody can do right now. Live. Hold out. Survive. I don’t know whether good times are coming back again. But I know that won’t matter if we don’t survive these times.” — , Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -…, 456

Note

The reply to ‘What are we supposed to do if you die?’ is reduced to a string of imperatives cumulatively stripped of content — Live. Hold out. Survive. — three verbs that get less articulate as they go, with the exclamation and the one-word command carrying the emotional charge the father has spent the whole argument suppressing. The concession that good times may never return is what keeps this from being a platitude.