The recent catastrophe in the Indian Ocean has by now been the subject of so much commentary and conversation that I hesitate to approach it. Yet some few events of a lifetime are of such moment that the requirement of their acknowledgement trumps the fully anticipated inadequacy of the terms in which acknowledgement must be offered. Before human suffering so great, effected by natural powers so tremendous, the human mind staggers back to the relative safety of exclamatory clichés.
Perhaps only an English professor could rush to the periphery to react to the local moral "discourse" of this disaster, but it has been woefully impoverished. Which countries have or have not been stingy in offering relief aid? How does that pledge stack up on a per capita basis as a proportion of GNP, a worker's daily wage, the price of a pack of cigarettes? How much moral credit will Indonesia — invariably qualified as "the most populous Muslim nation" — give us per hour of helicopter loan? The airwaves are full of this stuff. But our "how" world used to be a "why" world. A giant ocean wave separates them.
On the 1st of November, 1755, there occurred a devastating seismic event, apparently centered beneath the sea not far southwest of the Iberian peninsula. Though it certainly caused death and destruction in many parts of Europe and North Africa, the event is usually called the "Lisbon earthquake" on account of the truly horrendous devastation it effected in that capital Nor was it seen as a single "event" but as an anthology of horrors, including several earth tremors, one of them of huge destructive power, and a vast ocean wave that battered and submerged the city's quayside and low-lying urban shore front. Between 60,000 and 100,000 people were killed in Lisbon and its environs — crushed, drowned or burnt to death in the conflagrations that raged through the city's ruins.
Portugal was then a deeply Catholic country. The 1st of November is a major religious festival, All Saints' Day, and as the quake struck toward 10 in the morning, the churches were packed with worshippers. Modest virgins and pious matrons were crushed in a hail of marble slabs as vast baroque piles fell in an instant to heaps of rubble. The circumstances made the world ponder.
Goethe was a child of 6 at the time of the Lisbon earthquake. In his famous autobiography "Wahrheit und Dichtung" he writes retrospectively about the intrusion of this distant cataclysm upon his infantile innocence. "An extraordinary event deeply disturbed the Boy's peace of mind, for the first time . . . God, the Creator and Preserver of Heaven and Earth, whom the explanation of the first article of the Creed declared so wise and benignant . . . had not manifested Himself, by any means, in a fatherly character."
These are not the thoughts likely to occur to any child of 6 of my acquaintance today, even the infant geniuses destined for the earliest of early admission. But Goethe's natural response to natural disaster was that of the best minds of the European world: a meditation upon theodicy. Theodicy, not much in vogue these days, was the attempt to reconcile the belief in a loving and active deity with the empirical evidence of cosmic capriciousness. The "western consciousness" was never quite the same again. Voltaire gave up in something akin to despair, a despair that by the time of A. E. Housman, who died the year I was born, could be expressed with wry humor: "Malt does more than Milton can to justify God's ways to man."
We moderns, too, live by faith — even if it's the faith that somebody at OIT can revive my crashed computer. I know little about earth science or hydraulics, but I am a well-educated, modern person long accustomed to depending on experts to explain to me the operations of all sorts of things vital to my livelihood and my daily needs and comforts, indeed my continuing existence. These explanations, incidentally, frequently are called "owners' manuals" and, like the word "tsunami" itself, are often occluded by their obvious origins in the Japanese language, from which they have been torn half living; but I usually "understand" them, or kid myself that I do, in a satisfactory fashion. Hence I can more or less follow the buzz about tectonic plates on "Talk of the Nation" and "Science Friday," and I may even try the recommended experiment that involves jiggling large ceramic tiles in a birdbath. But no "how" answer, no matter its degree of scientific sophistication, can satisfy the hunger of a "why" question. John V. Fleming is the Louis W. Fairchild '24 professor of English. He can be reached at jfleming@princeton.edu.
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