What Does We Must Build Again Mean in by the Waters of Babylon

1937 mail service-apocalyptic short story by Stephen Vincent Benét

"By the Waters of Babylon" is a mail-apocalyptic curt story by American author Stephen Vincent Benét, commencement published July 31, 1937, in The Saturday Evening Mail service as "The Place of the Gods".^[ane] Information technology was republished in 1943 in The Pocket Book of Science Fiction,^[2] and was adapted in 1971 into a i-act play by Brainerd Duffield.^[3]

Plot summary [edit]

Fix in a future following the destruction of industrial civilization, the story is narrated by a boyfriend^[4] who is the son of a priest. The priests of John'southward people (the Colina People) are inquisitive people associated with the divine. They are the simply ones who can handle metallic nerveless from the homes (called the "Dead Places") of long-expressionless people whom they believe to be gods. The plot follows John's self-assigned mission to get to the Identify of the Gods. His father allows him to continue a spiritual journey, non realizing John is going to this forbidden place.

John journeys through the forest for eight days and crosses the river Ou-dis-sun. Once John gets to the Place of the Gods, he feels the free energy and magic at that place. He sees a statue of a "god"—in point of fact, a human—that says "ASHING" on its base. He also sees a building marked "UBTREAS". After being chased by dogs and climbing the stairs of a large building, John sees a dead god. Upon viewing the visage, he has an epiphany that the gods were humans whose power overwhelmed their good judgment. After John returns to his tribe, he tells his male parent of "the place New York." His father warns him against recounting his experiences to others in the tribe, for sometimes too much truth is a bad thing, that information technology must exist told little by little. The story ends with John stating his conviction that, once he becomes the head priest, "Nosotros must build once more."

Analysis [edit]

Benét wrote the story in response to the April 25, 1937 bombing of Guernica, in which Fascist military forces destroyed the majority of the Basque boondocks of Guernica during the Spanish Ceremonious War.^[v] This story took place before the public noesis of nuclear weapons, but Benét's description of "The Great Burning" is similar to afterward descriptions of the furnishings of the diminutive bombings at Nagasaki and Hiroshima. His "mortiferous mist" and "burn falling from the sky" seem eerily prescient of the descriptions of the aftermath of nuclear blasts. However, the "deadly mist" may also exist a reference to chemic weapons in Earth State of war I, peculiarly mustard gas, a feared weapon of war that Benét's generation was very familiar with. The story was written in 1937, five years before the Manhattan Project started, and eight years before there was widespread public knowledge of the projection.

Influence on afterward piece of work [edit]

Ayn Rand'south 1937 novella Anthem may have been inspired by this story.^[6]

In 1955 Edgar Pangborn wrote "The Music Master of Babylon",^[7] a post-apocalyptic story told from the point of view of a pianist living lonely in a ruined New York City, and later decades of total isolation encountering 2 youths from a new culture which had arisen in the world, who come exploring the ruined city. Pangborn depicted a different world than that of Benét, but referred to Benét'southward story in the title and in many of the story's details. Pangborn returned to that devastated globe in his after writings, including the novel Davy.

See also [edit]

• Anthem (novella)
• List of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction
• The title is a reference to Psalm 137 in the Bible.
• Rivers of Babylon (disambiguation)

Notes [edit]

1. ^ The term post-apocalyptic paraphrases Izzo.[1]
   Date of publication is from "BENÉT, STEPHEN VINCENT", in Miscellaneous Story Anthologies
   Benét changed the title when selecting works for Xiii O'Clock. (Fenton, 1958)
2. ^ "Book Information: Pocket Book of Science Fiction, the. Donald A. Wollheim, ed. (1943). Steven Jeffery / IBList.com, 2007". Archived from the original on 2007-10-12. Retrieved 2007-12-07 .
3. ^ Clarification from the play catalog of Dramatic Publishing. Archived 2011-07-17 at the Wayback Machine
   The adaption is distinct from the 2003 play of the same name by Robert Schenkkan.
4. ^ Wagar, p. 163, who likewise calls him a "young savage" (p. 25). Macdonald, p. 267-268, who calls him a "young brave". In the play adaptation, he appears as a beau and, in a non-speaking part, equally a boy. (Duffield, 1971)
5. ^ Source is Izzo, who as well notes that Benét wrote other stories and poems in response to the threat of Fascism in the 1930s.
6. ^ Mayhew, Robert (2005-05-20). Essays on Ayn Rand's Anthem. Lexington Books. pp. 120–121. ISBN978-0-7391-5474-8.
7. ^ Published 1954 by Milky way Science Fiction, appeared 1959 in The World That Couldn't Be, Ed. H.L. Gold, Doubleday.

Sources [edit]

• Benét, Stephen Vincent (July 31, 1937). Henry C. Pitz (illus.). "THE Identify OF THE GODS". Saturday Evening Mail. 210 (5): 10–11, 59–60 (4p).
• Benét, Stephen Vincent (1971) [1937]. 13 O'Clock: Stories of Several Worlds. Ayer Co Pub. ISBN0-8369-3793-7.
• Duffield, Brainerd; Stephen Vincent Benét (1971). Stephen Vincent Benet's Past the waters of Babylon; a play in one act. Chicago: Dramatic Pub. Co. (WorldCat) (preview)
• Fenton, Charles A. (1978) [1958]. Stephen Vincent Benet: The Life and Times of an American Human being of Letters, 1898-1943. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press. ISBN0-313-20200-1.
• Izzo, David Garrett. "Stephen Vincent Benét (1898-1943)". The Literary Encyclopedia . Retrieved 2007-06-20 . (virtually the author)
• Macdonald, Andrew, Gina Macdonald, and MaryAnn Sheridan. (2000). Shape-shifting: images of Native Americans in contempo popular fiction. Contributions to the study of popular culture, no. 71. Westport, Conn, Greenwood Press. ISBN 0-313-30842-X.
• Wagar, W. Warren (1982). Terminal Visions: The Literature of Last Things. Bloomington: Indiana University Printing. ISBN0-253-35847-7.

External links [edit]

• "By the Waters of Babylon" at Faded Page (Canada)

colvardportle.blogspot.com

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/By_the_Waters_of_Babylon

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