「Rain, Rain, Go to Spain」 Robert Wilson Lynd

III. The Earthquake

I SPENT Saturday night in a small hotel not many miles distant from Oxord. It was a peaceful little hotel that fell quietly asleep in the darkness as soon as the voices of the last birds and the last beer-drinkers had faded into silence.
Weary as a result of unaccustomed exposure to the air, I fell under the soporific influence of the place, went early to bed, and was asleep before midnight. Suddenly, between twelve and one, I was awakened by a crash. The house shook as though a football team were tumbling over the furniture in the rooms below. A gramophone began to whine rhythmically about love.
Whether it was dancing or fighting that was going on. to the music I did not know, but whatever it was, the violence was such that I was surprised that the house did not come falling about my ears Human voices began to join in. Human feet pounded up the stairs and along the passages and back again. It was impossible to sleep, for as soon as the noise promised to subside, a new song burst out on the gramophone and the hotel shook more alarmingly than ever, as if under the impact of giants jumping in its vitals. These phenomena ceased before two, but sleep had passed from me, and I was a wan, insomnious wreck when I went downstairs to breakfast on Sunday morning.
I asked the waitress who were the party who had invaded the hotel so noisily in the small hours. She looked startled, and said that so far as she knew, every one had been in and the hotel had been looked up early. When I described the phenomena of the night, however, she smiled with an air of relief, and said : ' Oh, that was a young gentleman celebrating his twenty-first birthday ! ' Later in the day I heard that England had been shaken by an earthquake. Friends from various parts of the country boasted of the palpitation of their homed, of vases that danced audiblv after midnight, of pencils that rolled off tables. Even as far away as Hull, I read in a newspaper, people had rushed from their houses in alarm. I could find no evidence, however, of anyone's having experienced a shock of anything like the same intensity as that which I myself experienced in the little waterside hotel. I am therefore inclined to wonder whether the seismologists are right in their explanation of Saturday night's earthquake. They attribute it, I gather, to a flaw in the earth's crust somewhere under the North Sea, Is it not more reasonable to suppose that the whole thing may have been due to a young gentleman's celebrating his twenty-first birthday near Oxford, the phenomena being most violent at the scene of the celebration and spreading with diminishing effect till they reached the coast and rattled the windows of Hull and Lowestoft ?
On discussing the earthquake with other people, I was surprised to find that most of them regarded it as a joke. Some of them were obviously proud to have been contemporaries of the greatest earthquake recorded in English history, but the general attitude was one of amusement. The men of science encouraged this attitude by declaring that earthquakes in England always are and always will be harmless. Thus we were lulled once more into a sense of security in a world in which there is no security, and an earthquake that should have turned us into philosophers has left us exactly as we were.
This is regrettable, for it is of the utmost importance that our sense of insecurity should not be allowed to fall permanently asleep, Like ourselves, it should have its. sleeping and its waking hours. If we were perpetually conscious of the insecurity of life and happiness we might easily become morbid, and lose our ardour alike In work and in pleasure. If we are never conscious of it, however, we are likely to set a false value on what is really valueless, and to waste our years in the pursuit of things that are not worth pursuing. Hence, it is an excellent medicine for the mind that we should occasionally realize that we are travelling through space on a fragile crust of earth that may one day subside, bringing a sadden end to ourselves, our possessions and our ambitions as our world topples into ruins amid the cracks. Many of the philosophers, at least, have thought so, and have made it their business to remind us that we build up our businesses and pursue our dreams under the shadow of death. We are all condemned to die, it has been said, but under an indefinite reprieve, and we cannot measure the worth of anything in life by a standard which takes no account of this.
On the other hand, it must be admitted, the sense of the insecurity of life affects different men in extraordinarily different fashions. One man comes to the conclusion that it is best in the circumstances to eat, drink and be merry. Another, impressed by the brevity of existence, sees in this a reason against wasting hours so few and so precious. Another is led by the spectacle of an evanescent world to the discovery of a world that will not pass with time, and to live as
though even now he were one of its citizens. We saw during the War that the nearness of
death, while it might make one man religious, woidd make his neighbour reckless, Hence, it must be inferred that it requires more than a war or an earthquake or a volcanic eruption to
convert human beings in general into philosophers. The men and women who live in the region of a volcano are not conspicuously wiser or more virtuous than those who live in secure and placid villages. The generation that lived in the fear of death during the great plague was less busied about the nature of the good life than the much securer mid -Victorians. This has led some people to believe that human beings are unteachable. And many of us are certainly unteachable by calamity. The truth is, even when our insecurity is staring us in the face, we can temporarily escape and hide ourselves from it in a variety of excitements. And we do.
Whether we enjoy life more as a result of a false belief in our security or as a result of recognizing the insecurity of life， is a question not easy to decide. I am myself of the opinion that the happiest man is the man who is conscious of the fleetingness of the world in which he lives and who measures the values of things by the knowledge of his and our mortality.
There are men with whom the thought of mortality has been a disease — men who have all but been conscious of the worms consuming their bodies while they were still alive — and these are
not to be envied. But with most men the knowledge that they must ultimately die does not weaken the pleasure in being at present alive. To the poet the world appears still more beautiful as he gazes at flowers that are doomed to wither, at springs that come to too speedy an end. The loveliness of May stirs him the more deeply because he knows that it is fading even
as he looks at it. It is not that the thought of universal mortality gives him pleasure, but that
he hugs the pleasure all the more closely because he knows it cannot be his for long. Besides, there is probably a deep pleasure to be had merely from facing facts. Men, often shrink
from truth, but, when they cease to shrink, they find it enjoyable. A man of science, if he could
fix the date of the end of the world, would cry ' Eureka ! ' and would rapturously sit down to
write a book about it. Not that he would take a monstrous delight in the prospect at the extermination of the human race, but the charms of truth would drive every other consideration out of his head. Probably it is for a similar reason that tragedy gives us a far profounder pleasure than comedy. Comedy is just as true to one side of life as tragedy is to another. But tragedy faces truths that comedy ignores, and depicts a world that knows death — a world that has not merely enjoyed itself and its blunders but has sundered and wept over its dead for countless generations. Tragedy is an exalted expression of our sense of insecurity. Comedy helps us to forget this. I, myself, as a rule read comedy and commend tragedy.
I am sure that, if the sense of insecurity enriches literature, it has an equally enriching effect in politics. This was seen during the War when, alarmed by the sense of insecurity, statesmen performed the Impossible. It is a commonplace, that, if statesmen faced the problems of peace with the same determination with which they faced the problems of war, they would find the solutions as miraculously simple. With the return of peace, however, the sense of security returns, and in a secure world men cannot be persuaded that it is necessary tomake the same efforts and the same sacrifices for the common good. What was then national co-operation now becomes Socialism. The individual returns to his money-making on the assumption that he is living in a world in which money-making can be securely pursued for ever. He feels that, with a good bank balance, he is as firmly established as Ben Nevis. When he is told by the pessimists that civilization is crumbling, he tells himself that at least it will last his time. He believes that earthquakes are dangerous only in countries not his own. So did I till I was awakened by the young gentleman celebrating his twenty-first birthday. At the time I was indignant with him, but at least he forced me to realize that I was living in a world that might at any moment tumble in ruins about my careless pillow.

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