A hammer like the one pictured above, a "single jack," plays a significant part in the story told by George R. Stewart in Earth Abides. If you haven't read the book, I commend it to you.
I am providing this recommendation having just finished Earth Abides - and I am writing out these notes just before dinnertime, on July 30, 2025, a couple of months and a few days earlier than the date on which I have scheduled them to be published, in early October.
When Stewart wrote the book, I was only six years old. I am nearly eighty-two years old today. Stewart's book ends with an old man (quite possibly eighty-two years old, himself), who is dying, as he thinks back to the life he has experienced: "Men go and come, but earth abides."
To quote Wikipedia, Stewart's novel "tells the story of the fall of civilization from deadly disease and the emergence of a new culture with simpler tools. Set in the 1940s in Berkeley, California, the story is told by Isherwood Williams, who emerges from isolation in the mountains only to discover that almost everyone had died."
It is easy to think ahead to some coming calamity, the likes of the one posited by Stewart. This morning's newspapers, for instance, say that the administration of our current president has now initiated a process by which the government will rescind the finding (which is indubitably true) that burning fossil fuels is leading to global warming. The result of this attempt formally to deny reality, if it should ultimately be successful, will be to eliminate any future governmental constraints, in the United States, on a process, well underway, that will, quite possibly, lead to the death of hundreds of millions, or even tens of billions, of human beings.
For any who are thinking ahead, and seeking to prepare themselves, mentally, for catastrophe on a global scale, Stewart's book is well worth reading.
And Earth Abides is "hopeful," too, at least in one way of thinking about it. Let me quote again the last seven words of the novel:
"Men go and come, but earth abides."
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