Isaac Asimov

When an old person dies who has been a part of your life, it is part of your youth that dies. And though you survive yourself, you must watch death take away the world of your youth, little by little.

To me, however, death is merely death, and a person who was alive is gone, and although sorrow and loneliness may devour you as a result, it should not be put on public display, any more than it must. I realize that this is not a popular view and will not prevail.

I don’t expect to live forever, nor do I repine over that, but I am weak enough to want to be remembered forever. —Yet how few of those who have lived, even of those who have accomplished far more than I have, linger on in world memory for even a single century after their death.

Ten thousand years ago, human beings devised the techniques of agriculture and herding and slowly begin the process of destroying the environment by overgrazing and by overfarming.

Still, not all that human beings could do in the wildest excesses of war and rapine could seriously damage the planet until 1945. In that year, the first nuclear bomb was exploded, and the Industrial Revolution, fed by cheap oil, went into high gear. We are now perfectly capable of damaging the planet beyond repair in any reasonable time, and are, in fact, in the process of doing so.

I refused to make any changes.

I said to them, haughtily, “It isn’t written in the stars that I must make a million dollars, but it is written in the stars that I must be true to my principles.”

So they fired me. They had someone else do the changes, and on June 26, 1978, I made them remove my name from the book. The project was a fiasco from beginning to end.

What does one do in a case like this? One is helpless in the face of cowardly publishers, pliant school boards, and fanatical ignoramuses. All I can do is write essays denouncing creationism with its believe in Adam, Eve, a talking serpent, and a worldwide Flood, all in a six- to ten-thousand-year-old universe, and in a supernatural creation of all the species of life so that they were different from the start.

Some of my essays appeared in as august an organ as The New York Times Magazine and that roused the anger of many Fundamentalists—an anger I am happy and proud to inspire.

I just work on the principle that of all the virtues gratitude (next to honesty) is the greatest, and that has helped me on numerous occasions in my life.

Man proposes and old age disposes—

It is not very difficult to write for teenagers if you avoid thinking of them as children. I do not simplify my vocabulary for them, though I often add the pronunciations of the technical terms, merely to reduce the terror they inspire visually. I do avoid sentences that are too long and complex and I do not indulge in obscure illusions. What is lacking in a teenager is not intelligence or reasoning ability, but merely experience.

The rest of the faculty avoided me for fear that too close an association with the school leper might get them into trouble too. One of them, however, approached me cautiously once and, making sure we were not under observation, he told me that he was proud of me end of my bravery and continuing to fight for academic freedom.

I shrugged. “There’s no bravery about it. I have academic freedom and I can give it to you in two words.”

“What’s that?” he asked.

“Outside income,” I said.

It’s true. The average faculty member is under an enormous disadvantage in a fight with the administration. He need not even be fired, he need merely be harassed, and he must start looking for a new position. They are not easy to find and generally, if he waits too long, he might find he is fired and, without a salary, he can be in deep financial trouble.

As one gets older and more rickety, and as medical technology advances, doctors love to play with their toys, using you as their victim.

Once when Isaac and I talked about old age, illness, and death, he said it wasn’t so terrible to get sick and old and to die if you’ve been part of life completing itself as a pattern. Even if you don’t make it to old age, it’s still worthwhile, there’s still pleasure in that vision of being part of the pattern of life—especially a pattern expressed in creativity and shared in love.

It is amazing how the young women flock about me now that I’m old and harmless. Where were they when I could have taken wicked advantage of their affection?