It was a dark and stormy night...

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents--except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803 - 1873), Paul Clifford (1830)

My windows are shaking. If I turn off my music I can hear the wind howling, the pained wailing punctuated by banging doors, the spare trashcan skipping like a tumbleweed in the wind. More worrying is the distant strains of the doppler effect, the sound the sirens here make that are so different from American cop cars. The joy of living in the fourth floor in the corner appartment is that the wind seems to take extra joy in tugging on our house as it passes, the rows of houses funneling and concentrating the air into buffeting gusts. The building doesn’t shake, for which I am grateful, but the dull roar sounds sometimes like a waterfall.



The storm isn’t too bad here, compared with other parts of Germany. The entire long-distance rail network has been shut down, and there are probably plenty of poor souls stuck somewhere they don’t want to be, waiting for trains that won’t come. It’s like Waiting for Godot plus The Tempest, without the silly tights. Nine people have died so far, either from trees or doors, come uprooted or unhinged. It’s strange in such a storm; everyday objects, objects of utility or beauty become dangerous, menacing, posing the greatest risk to us is our very environment. It makes you jumpy, wind saws on the nerves like hyperactive kids when you have a headache. A dull thump echoing from a block away tells me something has broken loose.



I love a good storm. Taking shelter, nothing is more spectacular than a fantastic lightning storm, the kind best watched from the back deck looking out over Green Valley of a summer evening. Exposed, nothing is more dangerous than a bolt of lightning on a tree-lined ridge, nothing more terrifying than being abord a ship buffeted by winds on an open sea. It’s exhilirating and frightening, exposed before raw power and forces I cannot even begin to comprehend.



Global warming has gone from far left field to mainstream, to mix metaphors; it is a phenomenon either created or abetted by human folly and greed, making these storms, ice storms, snow storms, droughts, hurricanes, floods, and any other natural disasters you can dream of even more a part of our daily life and, hopefully, our consciousness and conscience. I don’t know if there is anything to be done to prevent the increasingly inevitable; undoing the mistakes of the past—particularly in light of the sheer magnitude of human presence, in numbers and in effect—may well be beyond our control, and avoiding the mistakes of the present and future—as elusive as even this prospect may be—may well not be enough. As a friend of mine once wrote in a song, as we sat on his couch listening to the wind howling: "You can't fight the weather, 'cause you will always lose..."

Socialism failed because it couldn't tell the economic truth; capitalism may fail because it couldn't tell the ecological truth.
Lester Brown, Fortune Brainstorm Conference, 2006

That is what scares me—as I sit and listen to the wind, enjoying the tingle down my spine—that my seldom glimpse of natural violence may well become my daily fare. Who needs terrorism when an unsecured door can kill you, when everything burns, when the wind and weather tear your house to pieces?