“Witness Mr. Henry Bemis, a charter member in the fraternity of dreamers. A bookish little man whose passion is the printed page but who is conspired against by a bank president and a wife and a world full of tongue-cluckers and the unrelenting hands of a clock. But in just a moment, Mr. Bemis will enter a world without bank presidents or wives or clocks or anything else. He’ll have a world all to himself- without anyone.” – Rod Sterling, 1959
“Time Enough at Last” is the title of the eighth episode of the first season of the groundbreaking and one of my all-time favorite television series, The Twilight Zone. The episode aired in November 1959. It was written by Rod Serling and based on a short story by Lynn Venable.
This episode stars Burgess Meredith, as Henry Bemis, a bank clerk and bookworm who loves to READ books yet was so overwhelmed by a fast and changing world it prevented him from doing so.
During the episode as Henry disappears into the bank vault to eat his lunch and read a book, the world is destroyed by a nuclear bomb, knocking him unconscious. After regaining consciousness and recovering the thick glasses required for him to see (and READ), he emerges from the vault to find the bank destroyed and everyone dead. He is the last man on earth. The vault had saved him.
Finding himself in the devasted world alone but with enough canned food to last him a lifetime, he succumbs to his despair and prepares to kill himself with a gun he finds. Before he can shoot himself, he sees the ruins of the local library in the distance. He drops the gun and investigates. It is there that he finds the books are intact- all the books he could ever hope to READ– “time enough at last”.
He doesn’t need other people. He just needs books.
As he happily sorts through the books, he stumbles, causing his glasses to fall from his face and shatter on the ground. Now virtually blind, he scans the ground on his hands and knees, before finding the broken pieces of his glasses. He breaks down in tears, surrounded by the books he will never READ.
I watched that episode for the first time when I was a kid a couple decades after it had aired. That episode had always stuck with me. I would go on to watch it dozens of times through the years.
It hits upon themes that have always fascinated me- solitude versus loneliness, views by the fast-paced, modern mainstream world towards books, literature, and learning, and the dangers and reliance on science and technology.
As I’ve aged, the stack of my book collection has gotten taller, but at the same time, my life has continued to get busier. So much so, I don’t read nearly enough books as I would like.
Then the COVID pandemic hit, and the world mostly stopped. I thought of Henry Bemis.
“Time Enough at Last!”
I immediately bought several new books I had been wanting to read. But…
Most of them are still stacked on a shelf untouched. Instead of reading, I started writing again, something I had done off and on for years. I was writing a lot. It seemed much easier with the world turned off.
After the completion of my first two books, I was told by those managing me that I needed some way to promote myself and my books- a slogan, a poster, a brand. It had to be eye-catching and make a clear statement about who I was and what I was producing. It had to stand out.
I was stumped for weeks until I stood in the bathroom of a hip little eatery, named Hellbenders Burrito, in the small mountain town of Davis, West Virginia. On the wall in the men’s room, there was a poster that advertised another television series I loved, The X-Files. The poster showed a flying saucer in the sky with the slogan- “I WANT TO BELIEVE”.
For some odd reason as I stared at the poster, I again thought of the Twilight Zone character Henry Bemis and his love to READ, and my craving to READ more but not finding the time.
I re-imaged the X-Files poster slogan for myself on a promotional ad- “I WANT TO READ”. But that seemed too long for a sticker, a poster, an advertisement…
So, I chopped the slogan to one word:
“The best laid-plans of mice and men- and Harry Bemis, the small man in the glasses who wanted nothing but time. Harry Bemis, now just a part of a smashed landscape, just a piece of the rubble, just a fragment of what man has deeded himself…” – Rod Sterling, 1959