earthquake!

There was an earthquake in New York today while I was at school. Things shook briefly, like the static of a telephone made physical or as if 8 seconds worth of gigantic trucks had driven by. I loved it. I wanted it to continue. I lost my shit with glee. It was fantastically exciting to not, for a few seconds, take the immense inertia of the floor and the building for granted. It's like remembering the gigantic bully that is bad architecture has a still larger person to answer to.

A girl in my class reprimanded me for my glee. In the most immediate sense she said I was being rude to the people in the room who were frightened, but also to those at the epicenter of the earthquake in Washington D.C. that might be in danger. More generally, my glee wasn't respectful to those who had suffered and died because of earthquakes. She had an interesting point. I was dancing at the fringes of what was a potentially homicidal happening. The tremors we felt were of one and the same source as those that might have done great harm. It was immoderate to love the twitching tail of a dragon.

The thing is that everything awesome that happens in nature is inextricable from violence. We have oil only because dinosaurs died; We have Hyacinths only because Hyacinthus died; We have life only because the sun is on fire. Saying we're made of stars is really saying we're made of the shrapnel of explosions of incomprehensibly destructive power. Life is the warmth of someone else's pyre. Beauty is having a seat at someone else's apocalypse. The universe is a violent stage; the idea is to be a spectator, not a player.

Distance is the important thing. Noting that the chain of push and pushed was started by and littered with occurrences with names like "the big bang" would be true but no less rude for it if your neighbor's house was hit by lightning. Charlie Chaplin said that "life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot." Applied to the ongoing natural catastrophe that is the universe, it's polite to step backwards before we start chuckling at the wonder of the thing. Is New York far enough from D.C.? God, at any rate, must be enjoying the view.