Expanding Earth (A Novella) and Genesis as Metaphor (An Essay)

By Norman Nathan

Expanding Earth (a novella)
Family members recall Dr. Nathan talking about the works futuristic vision of planet earths biosphere being so burdened with the densest-ever human population that conditions require most people to live a subterranean existence. There simply is insufficient above-ground dry-land capacity to accommodate all members of the species at ground level. Dr. Nathan believed that the story could support an engaging, entertaining, and provocative movie, given its context set in an earth that is more overpopulated than imagined in any other book.

The novella was intended as a satirical warning of Malthusian eventualities if humans continue to fail to take control of their potential fate. In a 2004 letter, Dr. Nathan described the book as dealing with a problem that is worldwide. The writing is plot-driven and contains a wide variety of characters. Many readers will find in it an underlying satire of current events.

Genesis as Metaphor (an essay)
Dr. Nathan enjoyed teaching a university and life-long learning course titled The Bible as Literature. He had observed that most authors writing about the Bible appeared to be bound by a particular religious belief system and were much less interested in the Bible as a literary tome than as religious doctrine. He was sympathetic to presenting Catholic, Jewish, Protestant, Islamic, and Fundamentalist interpretations as part of the course, but he insisted they be treated only as particular interpretations. The Genesis as Metaphor essay exemplifies his approach to this subject area.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 4, 2015
• ISBN: 9781503542471

Norman Nathan

A professor emeritus of English literature at Florida Atlantic University (FAU), Dr. Norman Nathan published more than 550 poems, 6 books, 39 short stories, and 62 scholarly articles during his prolific writing career. Dr. Nathan’s poems and works of fiction covered a wide range of topics, including, to name a few, the seeming contradictions between the principles of physics and human experience; his childhood growing up in the New York City and Hoboken, New Jersey, areas; aging; politics and economics; biblical themes; English literary themes; and overpopulation.

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Copyright © 2015 by Norman Nathan, Ph.D.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Scripture quotations are from the Bible, King James Version (Authorized Version). First published in 1611. Quoted from the Official King James Bible Online™, Copyright © 2015.

Rev. date: 09/28/2015

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

EXPANDING EARTH

Foreword

Chapter 1 Premonitions

Chapter Two In The Lab

Chapter 3 Anti-Universal Activities

Chapter 4 Suzuki

Chapter 5 Gaspar

Chapter 6 The Wedding

Chapter 7 My Birthday

Chapter 8 The Committee on Anti-Universal Activities—Again

Chapter 9 Games And Gaspar

Chapter 10 Twenty-First Century:retirement at Birth

Chapter 11 The Great Meteor

Chapter 12 The Lotteries

Chapter 13 Sophie

Chapter 14 The Trial

Chapter 15 Hurdles

Chapter 16 Election Day

Chapter 17 Aftermath

GENESIS AS METAPHOR

Foreword

Genesis as Metaphor

Norman Nathan

(1915–2013)

Dr. Norman Nathan, Professor Emeritus of English Literature at Florida Atlantic University (FAU), published more than 550 poems, 6 books, 39 short stories, and 62 scholarly articles during his prolific writing career. This publication, and several others—including volumes of his poems and short stories—are intended to fulfill his formal request for his unpublished work to be published posthumously.

His works were published in literary magazines, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and many other magazines, journals, and newspapers. The FAU library maintains an extensive archive (from the 1930s through 2012) of many of his papers in its Norman Nathan Faculty Papers Collection (see http://fauarchon.fcla.edu/?p=collections/controlcard&id=135). The Special Collections of the FAU Library Archives are located physically in Boca Raton, Florida, and Dr. Nathan’s materials occupy nearly 16 linear feet of space.

Dr. Nathan’s poems and works of fiction covered a wide range of topics, including, to name a few, the seeming contradictions between the principles of physics and human experience; his childhood growing up in the New York City and Hoboken, New Jersey, areas; aging; politics and economics; biblical themes; English literary themes; and overpopulation.

Norman Nathan was born on November 19, 1915, in Brooklyn, New York, to parents Michael and Fannie Nathan. He had an older brother, Leonard Post, and two older sisters, Sylvia Kurtzman and Dora Bernstein, all of whom predeceased him.

Dr. Nathan graduated from A.J. Demarest High School in 1932 and received his BA in English from New York University in 1936. In 1938, he earned his MA from NYU, and in 1947, he defended his dissertation on Blake and earned his PhD in English from NYU.

On July 21, 1940, he married Frieda Agin of Union City, New Jersey, to whom he was devoted until her passing in 2008. Together they had three daughters. Their oldest, Linda Kuzmack (Richard), gave them two granddaughters, Stefanie Lynn Kuzmack and Tricia Kuzmack Stering (Jonathan). Their second daughter, Michele Nathan (K. Lee Herring), gave them three grandsons, Julian Keir Herring-Nathan, Evan Ross Herring-Nathan, and Damian Joel Herring-Nathan. The family has continued to grow with (thus far) the births of great-grandson Emerson Reed Stering and great-granddaughter Samantha Blake Stering.

In 1949, Dr. Nathan moved his family from West New York, New Jersey, to Utica, New York, where he began a long career as an English professor at Utica College of Syracuse University. In 1968, the family moved to Boca Raton, Florida, where Dr. Nathan continued his teaching career at FAU. In part because of his failing vision resulting from macular degeneration, he retired from FAU in 1993, at age 78. The title Professor Emeritus was conferred on him in 1994. In 1996, he and his wife moved to Arlington, Virginia, to be near their two oldest daughters. He passed away peacefully on June 11, 2013.

During his long academic career, Dr. Nathan enjoyed visiting professorships at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, College of the Virgin Islands, and Nevada Southern University (now University of Nevada, Las Vegas). He also taught for a semester at Florida State University’s program in London. In Utica, he became a local TV personality through his popular two-year weekly program on Shakespeare. While at FAU, he developed and hosted a 10-part lecture series on Shakespeare that aired on a local TV channel. Courses taught by Dr. Nathan from the 1940s through the mid-1990s included 18th-Century Literature, the Bible as Literature, Blake, Creative Writing, English Composition, English Literature, Foreign Literature in Translation, History of the English Language, Linguistics, Literary Criticism, Masterpieces of Literature, Poetry, Public Speaking, Shakespeare, and Time & Motion Study.

Books published by Dr. Nathan include Though Night Remain (poems; Golden Quill, 1959), Judging Poetry (textbook; Putnam, l96l), The Right Word (vocabulary textbook-workbook; Houghton-Mifflin, 1962), Writing Sentences (textbook-workbook; Houghton-Mifflin, l964), Short Stories (anthology-textbook; Bobbs-Merrill, 1969), and Prince William B.: The Philosophical Conceptions of William Blake (literary analysis; Mouton, 1975).

EXPANDING EARTH

Foreword

Dr. Nathan began writing this novella by at least the early 1960s, and over time, he assigned the story varied titles (e.g., A Hive of Drones, Retirement at Birth, World of Roomspace, and The World with Only People). These alternative titles provide additional insight into his message. Family members recall Dr. Nathan talking about the work’s futuristic vision of planet earth’s biosphere being so burdened with the densest-ever human population that conditions require people to live a subterranean existence. There simply is insufficient above-ground dry-land capacity to accommodate all members of the species at ground level. Dr. Nathan believed that the story could support an engaging, entertaining, and provocative movie, given its context set in an earth that is more overpopulated than imagined in any other book.

The novella was intended as a satirical warning of Malthusian eventualities if humans continue to fail to take control of their potential fate. In a 2004 letter, Dr. Nathan described the book as dealing with a problem that is worldwide. The writing is plot-driven and contains a wide variety of characters. Many readers will find in it an underlying satire of current events.

K. Lee Herring

Chapter 1

§

PREMONITIONS

Every once in a while I have the same nightmare. Perhaps I shouldn’t use that word, for I am not asleep when it occurs, and it may come at any hour on the clock. I prefer not to say that it can happen day or night, for all through the world the clocks agree. Only by visiting the surface of the Earth can we be sure that the sun is shining or darkness has fallen on the top of the Segment where we live. The drabness can be oppressive if you can’t fall asleep and are tired of listening to one more story on Lifecast.

In my nightmare I visualize that I am surrounded by hundreds, even thousands of people overflowing in one gigantic room. I feel crushed, smothered; even though I am lying on the floor and am not exercising any muscles, I am out of breath. I imagine that I am ever so slowly pushing my way into the next room. Except for a different color on the walls and slightly less familiar faces, I’m in the same crowded, mob-like situation.

In my mind I flee up to the floor above, then to a level below. Nothing in this seemingly infinitely overpopulated apartment house really changes. Am I dreaming? I ask myself. I try to shake my body awake. I stretch. I open my eyes as wide as I can. I clench my fists.

But I am awake! I recover from my daze. I adjust. This is 2455. This is the real world. I am 492 years old. I look again at my skin, no more wrinkled than my father’s when he died in the last year of the twentieth century at the age of eighty.

Then I sigh, deeply, heavily. Yes, I can live in this still strange world—even enjoy my life, though a sudden flood of memory on occasion overwhelms me. I long for a chocolate soda in a tall glass with pistachio ice cream floating on top. Oh, to gorge myself on a seven-course dinner ending with cherries jubilee!

Then I shake my head, and shiver. I remember. We had food, clothes, things, THINGS! and work to do. Yet manwos were just as bored then as we are now with only food pills, no clothes, hardly a thing that we can hold in our hands, and almost no work. Every once in a while I open and close my hands as if I were holding something. It’s a good feeling, but it lasts only a moment. WE live in leisureville, or is it leisure vile? Leisure should not approach the doing nothing that is death.

No, I’m not bored. True, like everybody else, I lack possessions; but when did things themselves bring happiness? Despite all that has been lost throughout the centuries, I can and do engage in many interesting activities. I am luckier than most; I’m given time in a science lab. Not a hundredth as much as I would like, but I have this little extra space; a rare privilege in our society. And when I am in my usual roomspace, I can watch and analyze the conduct and imagine the thoughts of my friends and neighbors. Fortunately, my mind is agile and always willing to be active. When in the history of the world could a contemplative mind do more than now? So I look around at the large space of which I occupy only a minuscule portion. Walls are far apart, and with infrequent exceptions, there are no doors to conceal individuals. Even a Secrets Corner is enclosed in clear glass.

Dreams end. Henry! I hear my wife’s sometimes-shrill voice. Your skin is mottled all over. Are you having another one of those fantasies of yours?

She is shaking me, but there is still some tenderness in her touch.

Yes I am, Sumara. Sort of, well, a nightmare. But I’m okay. I don’t bother to explain what are, to her, my strange moods. Although she is only eighteen years my junior, except for a few sentimentalities she prefers to forget the past. She loves the new, the newest. Even her food pills, unlike the conventional drab white of mine, are requested each week in a different color, be it yellow, pink, or puce.

When you, ages from now, read or listen to this story, which I have been permitted to put into a time capsule, you may not realize—if clothes have returned to your civilization—how an emotional reaction can paint your flesh for your several dozen neighbors to clearly examine. Many a time I’ve caught others discreetly looking at me from surrounding spaces. I can hear them saying to each other, There he goes again! What a strange manwo!

I don’t mind this exposure—as if I could. But in one sense, if clothes come back you will have lost something. For now we don’t primarily look at another’s body from a sexual aspect. No, glancing at our neighbors’ nakednesses, we tend to fancy their emotional states or even their thoughts at the moment. It’s a fun game. And one real value of this nudity is that we are rarely embarrassed when others observe us. True, most manwos squat when bending rather than bowing from the hips, but it really doesn’t matter what view anyone sees.

I noticed Sumara checking the clock on the ceiling. It’s ten minutes past waking time, she said. The cleaning stations already have long lines. And you wanted us to get an early start to visit Yoko and Alexander.

I stretched lazily. Sumara did not require a verbal response if she saw that you were reacting favorably to her complaint. So I walked rapidly over to the cleaning stations, being careful to keep to the narrow paths and not intrude even an inch on anyone’s living space. After all, ten by eight feet was small enough an apartment without having others step into space presumed to be exclusively your own.

Actually, wherever I walked, and regardless of any seeming haste, I sharply observed my fellow manwos. Centuries before, people wore clothes partly to individualize themselves. But is there anything more individualizing than nudity? Particularly since now we neither lose nor gain weight once we are adults. I remember a time when ten additional pounds could change a model figure into a plumpness not worth looking at. Now we are what we are and remain so.

I’m not, of course, talking about superficial appearances. You have to look close. Perhaps you have to live in a naked world to understand me, to sense how a quivering muscle or a strawberry birthmark on a buttock suggested a cause and possibly a history. There are bodies that I enjoy looking at sensually. Sumara’s is one. And there are a few others, but just as one can never fully explain why you love one person more than another, so it is impossible to understand why one body arouses you more than those of others.

Nothing mentally eventful happened before I reached a nail-hair station. Quickly I ran the small knife over my face and over those nails that were a trifle long. How many times have I been tempted, at least on occasion, to leave my nails this minuscule longer, but I obey the law. I pushed a button and a blast of air sucked all my cuttings into a tube.

As Sumara had warned, I had to waste ten minutes on the cleaning line. Fortunately, the manwos just before and after me (both of whom I did not recognize) were not inclined to talk. I normally prefer to observe rather than chatter. Still, an unusual thing happened. I was jostled slightly by the male behind me. He muttered something which I took as an apology. He must be, I assumed, from a much lower room where manwos were not as considerate of each other’s space. I recalled that I had been pushed a bit several times in the last month. Maybe manners were once again deteriorating. If so, Lifecast would soon be launching programs designed to correct the situation.

Then it occurred to me that this pusher might be a government spy. Two weeks before I had absentmindedly not voicegrammed my number to the cleaning agency, and it was said that if you missed this most important function of the day, you might be investigated. Oh, well! I thought, I haven’t forgotten since then, and I vowed to be more careful in the future.

When my turn came, I picked up the small towel in the sterilizing chamber and touched the thin but strong silk-like material to every part of my body, even between my legs and my toes. All loose Global would adhere to the cloth. Global is the basic material of the world, whether it is in the form of mesons, atoms, or quarks, the floor I stand on, my body, food pills, or energy. We always capitalize the word, and as this account continues, you will understand why.

While it was possible to miss a spot and therefore a speck or two, anyone who noticeably neglected to cover every possible area would be subjected to frowns by those waiting their turns. Why, oh why, I asked myself, are there so few rebels among us? It was more than government control. Apparently manwos now loved to be told what to do. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone reported the omission.

I took perhaps a few seconds longer than average to complete my hygiene, for with my age and position I had to set a good example. Then I returned the cloth to its receptacle. The clinging bits of Global would be suctioned to a collection area to be converted into food pills or whatever form of Global was presently in short supply.

Before Sumara and I left for our visit we had, of course, to perform the daily patriotic service of cleaning our space. So, for a few minutes we searched every inch for a speck of anything. Sumara won the day’s contest, for she triumphantly picked up a stray inch-long hair, which she proceeded to deposit in a cleaning receptacle, returning with what I’d describe as a trace of a strut as she swayed her hips.

Ready, Henry? she asked, though she was not. But I nodded as I observed her leaving-the-room ritual. She was pinching her cheeks almost savagely to bring a deeper tone to her flesh, and this was always her departure signal.

Our daughter Yoko lived over 1,500 miles away and at a level an eighth of the Earth’s diameter lower than we were. But with the shoot cars we’d be there in only 107 minutes. Don’t think of us as backward. Shoot cars could be made to travel three to four times their present 900 miles an hour, but we judge that to be an extravagant use of energy, which, after all, is a form of Global.

Sumara entered a shoot car before me. I was, after all these centuries, a ladies-first person. I think Sumara was originally attracted to me because of this quality. Oh, she believed in what was once called unisex. Still, she didn’t always prefer the new manners, even though she loved the new fashions.

Ten seconds later I entered the next car and set the dials for the appropriate longitude, latitude, and floor level. Then I selected a classical music channel. True, there were thousands of different movies that I could view on the ceiling of the car, but I sometimes felt that I’d seen them all before. And I never tire of great music.

Though I always wanted to listen to music with uninterrupted intensity (after all, the crowded world did not impinge on melodic sounds in the insulated privacy of a shoot car), I twisted and stretched many times during the journey. I was frequently a little uncomfortable traveling, if the trip lasted more than a few minutes. There was no other way to fit but to lie on your back, and I am a sleep-on-your-side kind of person.

The confining walls of the cylinder generally did not