"against the Day"

[Paul Nightingale]

> Maybe now that we know it as the title, we'll be seeing it
> everywhere. Unconsciously using it in conversation, e-mail, letters to the
> electric company...
> 
> Don Corathers
> 

The phrase is portentous (just to begin by stating the obvious) and (one
might say therefore) it often lends itself to hackneyed rhetoric. To me it
sounds like the title a modernist writer might have chosen at the time P is
(ostensibly) writing about: another case of pastiche.

However, trying to second-guess P is likely to be a thankless task; although
we might continue to consider the ways in which the phrase is put to use,
how it is organised discursively.

So here's Jack London, from the time of his Hawaiian stories, c.WW1, ranting
against:

"... the amazing mongrelization of races in this smelting-pot.... Marrying
with the other races as they do ... the Hawaiian strain grows thinner and
thinner against the day when it will vanish in thin air."

Cited in: David Raney (2003) '"No Ties except Those of Blood": Class, Race,
and Jack London's American Plague' in Papers on Language & Literature (39/4;
no pagination, sorry). Raney's essay begins by noting that the meaning of
the word 'germ' changed in the second half of the C19th, and the attendant
ideas of infection/contagion attached to migration/attitudes towards
migrants: one can reasonably infer, from the blurb, that this is a theme in
AtD, as well as being ([perhaps) one of the latter-day references P
diligently warns us against. See also the reference to germ warfare in the
PJ interview.

And then there's Orwell, writing in 1946:

"When one considers how things have gone since 1930 or thereabouts, it is
not easy to believe in the survival of civilisation. I do not argue from
this that the only thing to do is to abjure practical politics, retire to
some remote place and concentrate either on individual salvation or on
building up self-supporting communities against the day when the atom bombs
have done their work. I think one must continue the political struggle, just
as a doctor must try to save the life of a patient who is probably going to
die. But I do suggest that we shall get nowhere unless we start by
recognising that political behaviour is largely non-rational, that the world
is suffering from some kind of mental disease which must be diagnosed before
it can be cured."

From: 'Riding Down From Bangor' in The Collected Essays, Journalism and
Letters of George Orwell Vol. 4; Nonpareil Books, 2000, 248-249. Echoes here
of the SL and 1984 Intros.