Simon Grantaire (sijevoulais) wrote in thedoorway, @ 2015-10-03 17:21:00 |
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Entry tags: | !network post, simon grantaire |
My list of Things Which Arguably Benefit Humanity As A Whole But Detract All the Same From A Certain Shared Sense of Wonder and/or Common Vexation is extensive, and it occurs to me that I've been doing everyone a disservice by rendering it largely in oral form. Why deprive all but one lucky man of my incisive observations? It seems a waste of insight, particularly considering how poorly he listens. If you asked him to recite it back to you (and I know this from experience) he would reply only with a shamelessly bald summation of the bare bones of something arguably adjacent to what you've been saying: you were talking about the weather. Not a man to whom you entrust the future of human knowledge.
At any rate: meteorology.
It used to be that, apart from sailors and certain very sensitive elderly persons, no one knew when they were going to wake up to cold, blowing rain that seemed to come out of nowhere. You definitely didn't know that it had been sitting around incubating in the West Indies for a while, that it had decided to climb its way north, and that it might or might not show up on your horizon within a defined twelve hour period. You couldn't see that it stretched straight on down from Massachusetts to South Carolina (or, roughly, Marseilles to Marrakesh) in one terrifying, unbroken wall of cloud that frankly looks like something out of hell itself.
It was a surprise. It gave you something to be indignant about with your neighbors. There was a shared sense of injustice and of being put-upon that was beneficial to the community of man. Is there any force more powerful in the forging of friendship than a common enemy? It was the weather, fickle, rude, occasionally munificent, often offensive. Now, instead of shared anger, you have shared fear of something that's still cooking down in the Caribbean. I suppose the head start it gives you in terms of laying sandbags is hard to outweigh, but nonetheless.
It's hardly the same.