Presently she could see the submarine no longer; it had vanished in the most. She looked at her little wrist watch; it showed one minute past ten. Her childhood religion came back to her in those last minutes; one ought to do something about that, she thought. A little alcoholically she murmured a Lord's Prayer.
Then she took out the red carton from her bag, and opened the vial, and held the tablets in her hand. Another spasm shook her, and she smiled faintly. "Foxed you this time," she said. She took the cork out of the bottle. It was ten past ten. She said earnestly, "Dwight, if you're on your way already, wait for me." The she put the tablets in her mouth and swallowed them down with a mouthful of brandy, sitting behind the wheel of her big car." [Final paragraphs in the book "On the Beach"]
Vladimir Putin's threat of nuclear war brings back the final scene in the 1959 movie based on Nevil Shute's famous - and now all-but-forgotten - book "On the Beach", a post-apocalyptic novel published in 1957. It details the experiences of a mixed group of people in Melbourne as they await the arrival of deadly radiation spreading towards them from the Northern Hemisphere, following a nuclear war. As the radiation approaches, each person deals with impending death differently.
The movie was remade in 2000 as an Australian television film:
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This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper. T.S. Eliot |
P.S. Let's hope there's still time to watch the movie based on one of Nevil Shute's other great stories: "A Town Like Alice". Or, perhaps more fittingly, try to find a copy of "The Man Who Saved the World", a 2013 feature-length Danish documentary film by filmmaker Peter Anthony about Stanislav Petrov, a former lieutenant-colonel of the Soviet Air Defence Forces, and his role in preventing the 1983 Soviet nuclear false alarm incident from leading to nuclear holocaust - click here.
