Civilization's rise and return

Civilization's rise and return is the uncertain passage from a society surviving on the remnants of the Old Times to new communities that must make their own durable ways of living. Ish first imagines knowledge preserved in books as a means to rebuild; later, he sees that neither survival nor renewed civilization is assured, and that any future society will be shaped by local conditions, inherited fragments, and choices about what to carry forward. The novel's return is therefore not a simple restoration: new civilizations may emerge, but the old cycle of conquest and oppression may return with them.

The Scavenging Interval

For a time, the surviving community can live without rebuilding the systems that once made its world. Ish recognizes that The Tribe is content with its life of scavenging: people open stored cans and use ammunition and matches left from the past, while cattle provide another food source. This arrangement can appear stable because necessities remain available, and cattle might extend the interval before scarcity becomes acute. But it depends on a store of inherited goods that cannot replenish itself.

Ish's fear is not only that the supplies will eventually run out. Rifle ammunition depends on gunpowder that deteriorates with time, while matches are also finite. He imagines that after three or four generations, survivors might have lost civilization without acquiring the basic skills that let people live securely without it. The danger lies in becoming stranded between two conditions: no longer able to draw on the old material abundance, but not yet capable of sustaining a new way of life. He even considers the possibility that the human population might fail to make that transition at all. This is Ish's projection rather than a certain forecast, but it gives the community's present comfort a severe limit.

That recognition follows the death of Joey and grows out of Ish's conclusion that The Tribe does not want to restore civilization. The loss sharpens his sense of the forces shaping the future, yet his prediction remains bounded by uncertainty: he cannot know what will happen several generations later. His image of the stars moving in their courses frames human history as subject to circumstances larger than any individual's plan. Civilization may be rebuilt, but foresight alone cannot guarantee it.

Knowledge, Skills, and Inheritance

Earlier, Ish had approached the University Library as a storehouse from which a future could be recovered. Once he knows he will become a father, he sees its books not merely as relics but as accumulated knowledge that might help prevent a child from growing up permanently dependent on scavenging. His excitement in the stacks widens that ambition: books matter, but only if people can read and use them; seeds matter too, because essential domestic plants must not disappear. The project of rebuilding therefore requires living carriers of knowledge and material means of subsistence, not simply the preservation of written records.

The books he takes from the Public Library offer a contrast. He leaves with Robinson Crusoe and The Swiss Family Robinson, but neither satisfies him: the first seems preoccupied with religion, while the second seems to depend on a ship that supplies whatever its characters need. Stories and books survive the old world, but their presence does not by itself teach a community to meet its needs. In Ish's later reflections, the issue becomes how traditions and beliefs take root when there is little stored-up tradition and children may not learn through reading. He recognizes that repeated teaching could establish beliefs with great force, but also confronts the difficulty of honestly choosing what to teach. Cultural inheritance can be deliberately shaped; it is not automatically trustworthy merely because it lasts.

The bow-making episode offers a more practical model of transmission. Ish works with materials that people can obtain for themselves, shaping a bow and making its cord from calf skin rather than relying on nylon line. The children take up the work: before dinner, each is making a bow of his own. Their first efforts bring poorly aimed arrows and worries about injuries, so rules are needed to keep the practice away from people and houses. The episode shows a skill passing through demonstration and imitation, alongside the communal discipline required to make its use safer. Unlike ammunition or matches, the technique does not depend on an inexhaustible supply of manufactured goods from the old world.

Different Futures, Different Traditions

Ish's vision of the distant future is plural rather than unified. He imagines small tribes living separately, each going its own way, their differences shaped by accidents of survival and place. The communities he pictures do not simply recover a single common civilization. One lives among tidal channels, fears an Other-world, prays frequently, and relies on boats, fishing, clams, and wild-grass seeds. Another grows corn beside a river, keeps horses and turkeys, and traps rabbits, but has no bows. A further community speaks English in a changed form, raises pigs, chickens, corn, and cotton, and treats cotton as a sacred offering rather than putting it to ordinary use.

These imagined societies preserve and transform fragments differently. In another community, hunting dogs work with skilled archers, public assembly and debate are valued, and women walk proudly. Its god is symbolized by a hammer, but the people do not treat that symbol with great reverence. The contrast with Ish's own experience makes clear that an object or practice can outlast its original meaning and enter a new system of belief—or lose its former sacred weight. The future is not a clean break from the past, but neither is it a faithful copy: customs change as tools, environments, and communal priorities change.

Return Without Restoration

Ish expects these separate peoples eventually to multiply, meet, and cross-fertilize in body and mind. From that unplanned contact, he thinks, new civilizations will arise. The prospect offers a form of return, but it is not a program Ish can direct, and it does not promise a return to the institutions or achievements of the Old Times. The future emerges blindly from interaction among communities that first develop along different paths.

At the end of his life, Ish sees himself as the last person of the old world and the young men around him as the first of the new. He cannot know whether they will repeat the course their predecessors followed, and he no longer wants that repetition as an unquestioned good. He remembers that civilization was built through slavery, conquest, war, and oppression as well as through its material and intellectual accomplishments. Even the bridge beside him belongs to the civilization that made it, a remnant connecting the dying man to the world he outlived. The novel leaves the next cycle open: civilizations may return, but their return is neither restoration nor proof of progress, and the new have no obligation to reproduce everything the old made.