Sunday, May 24, 2009

Impending Doom Syndrome

Two quakes of note:

Sunday, May 17, 4.7M, 1 km ESE Lennox CA, 8:39 p.m PDT (depth 15 km)
Tuesday, May 19, 4.0M, 2 km NNE Hawthorne CA, 3:49 p.m. PDT (depth 15.3 km)

As a child I thought a great deal about meaninglessness, which seemed at the time the most prominent negative feature on the horizon. After a few years of failing to find meaning in the more commonly recommended venues I learned that I could find it in geology, so I did. This in turn enabled me to find meaning in the Episcopal litany, most acutely in the words
as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end, which I interpreted as a literal description of the constant changing of the earth, the unending erosion of the shores and mountains, the inexorable shifting in the geological structures that could throw up mountains and islands and could just as reliably take them away. I found earthquakes, even when I was in them, deeply satisfying, abruptly revealed evidence of the scheme in action. That the scheme could destroy the works of man might be a personal regret but remained, in the larger picture I had come to recognize, a matter of abiding indifference. No eye was on the sparrow. No one was watching me.

Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking (Knopf, 2005)

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