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It took me quite a few drafts before I finally managed to produce what I now consider to be the definitive version of my earthquake experience story. This letter to my church, which was written three weeks after the quake and sometime before the final draft (as I felt the pressure to relate to those back home what I had experienced), reflects on the difficulty of writing about the experience and struggles to articulate some of the things I had learned and was learning from the experience  - and, in the process, incorporates quite a number of those early drafts.
One interesting tidbit I noticed upon this re-reading that I hadn't noticed before was that this letter contains (and was most likely the origin) of a line that later became the conclusion of my poem about my experience of learning to teach: "And God, and life, and love are all our school."
Tuesday, February 7, 1995 
My dear friends and brothers and sisters in the Lord Jesus Christ,
It's all very ironic. Here I have finally had an experience that's definitely worth taking the time to write about to you and I find myself unable to express the experience adequately in words. And if I can't make you experience everything that I felt, or that any one of the earthquake survivors felt, with my words, should I even attempt to do so? Is there not a very great danger that you will think my unsuccessful attempt successful and believe that you fully understand the feelings and experiences of the victims of the earthquake?
On the other hand, this is a danger that we run every day, even in face-to-face conversation with one another. Our words are never adequate to fully express to one another our feelings and experiences and ideas and the deepest things of our hearts. The earthquake, and all experiences like it, only magnify these difficulties. Fortunately, God has also equipped us with imaginations to fill in the gaps--not always accurately, to be sure, but usually quite effectively--between our inadequate words.
And I believe strongly in the power and the usefulness of the imagination. I may not know--and hopefully will never experience--what it is like to fall from a 50-foot cliff, but I can extrapolate from my experience of lesser falls, and from what I know of pain and of dropping and breaking things and of gravity so that I don't have to actually jump off a 50-foot cliff to find out. I may not know what it is like to grow up in a broken home, but I can listen and observe and ask questions and fill in using the imagination so that I don't have to have go back in a time machine and experience a second, less pleasant, childhood to find out. I will never know perfectly what either of these things are like, of course (or at least I won't unless something rather drastic and unexpected happens to me), but, using my imagination, I can learn enough of these things to know that I should avoid jumping off of 50-foot cliffs if I can help it, particularly if there isn't any deep water down at the base of them, and to understand and sympathize with and possibly know how to help a childhood victim of a divorce.
Imagination is, in fact, the very basis of Jesus' greatest commandment: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. I don't imagine that he means by that that I should go out and buy a pepperoni and back-bacon pizza for my friend just because I happen to like pepperoni and back-bacon pizza and would love it if he brought over a pepperoni and back-bacon pizza for me. My friend may hate pepperoni and back-bacon pizza just as much as I happen to hate ham and pineapple pizza, and doing such a thing in such a case would not be doing a service or good thing for either of us.
No. What Jesus meant when he told us to do unto others as we would have them do unto us is: Use your imagination! Put yourself in their shoes. Identify with the other person and get to know and understand his likes and dislikes just as much as you can. If what you see that your neighbour likes and wants is something helpful and would be good (or at least not bad) for him, do it for him! If not, do for him what he really needs rather than what he wants, but do it in such a way as is most likely to teach him and please him, just as you would want to be taught patiently and kindly and gently if your wants and desires turned out to be in the wrong.
But notice that in all of this we have to use our brains and our imaginations. We have to do our best to try and understand the person and to get inside his skin, so to speak, and to see things from his perspective. We don't relinquish our own perspective, of course, and we subject both his and our human perspectives to God's perfect perspective, but the second-most important thing is to listen and observe and to use our imagination and our own experiences of life to try and fill in the gaps in our understanding so that we can see the world from our neighbour's point of view so we can do for him what he'd want to be done. (The first-most important thing is, of course, to do the same for God.)
So, having preached my sermon for the day, and having sorted out some of my own thoughts in the meantime, I will now turn to the story you've all been wanting to hear. It is a solemn story, but not without its touches of humanity and humour for all its solemnity and pathos, for the actors in it are human and living, and, as I'm just now beginning to see, even in the midst of death and tragedy, life--as it always does and must ever do so--goes on. As I wrote shortly before the quake,
Life is good. And then it's bad.
 And then it's good again.
But if this life was all we had,
 I ask, Would it have been
Worth all the effort, all the trouble,
 Only to have it turn to rubble?
But if this life is not the end,
 But just a shadow of
The tragicomical event
 Upon the stage above,
I ask, Would it not be all right
 If that event was love?
And so I place this story in your hands, at the mercy of your imaginations. All I ask is that you read it in a spirit of love. We are not perfect, though we were meant to be; life is not easy but, within it, we are free. Free to make our own mistakes. Free to learn from what we break. And God, and life, and love are all our school.

The Monday before the big earthquake was an ordinary Monday. That is to say, it was unscheduled, poorly-planned, and chaotic: I try to keep all my Mondays that way in this over-scheduled, highly-planned, and extremely organized society that is Japan. Monday is of course my day off. You don't get unscheduled and chaotic on your work-days in this country, or if you do, you end up getting fired and sent home--or as close to it as they come in this culture of unsurpassable politeness.
I woke up late Monday, as usual--I forget why this time. I think the reason was because I was up late Sunday night finishing off a late Christmas letter to my Great Aunt Grace. I woke up with a few vague plans in mind and, after a slow start getting breakfast and dressed, phoned my student, Takako, who had invited me to come over to visit her and her husband at their house that day. I informed her that I had to go into Osaka to buy a birthday present for my father, but that I hoped to be able to visit them around four-thirty or five that afternoon. She seemed disappointed that I wouldn't be able to visit them earlier, but it's always hard to tell over the phone with the language barrier and the politeness involved, and there wasn't much else I could do, so I told myself not to worry about it.
I tucked Aunt Grace's letter into my pocket to mail on my way to the station. I also took my Bible with me to read on the train on the way into Osaka--I hadn't had time to study much recently, and what good is a missionary who doesn't read his Bible regularly? But, as it turned out, the post office was closed because it was a national holiday, and I didn't have any stamps. Nor did I have much energy for reading--I felt rather tired that day, despite my long night's sleep-- so on the train I ended up mostly just staring out the window at all the drab houses and ramshackle industrial buildings (some with rusty corrugated tin roofs) that flashed by. Not the typical picture of Japan that springs to mind when a foreigner usually thinks of that country, and certainly not the image promoted by the Japan Travel Bureau, but still rather impressive when one saw miles upon miles of the same dreary, but busy and prosperous, landscape rolling past the windows of this very modern and convenient train.
The trip into Osaka, however, proved to be a rather dramatic waste of time and money. Even in the sizable English section of the gigantic Kinokuniya bookstore I was unable to find a book on Japan worth sending all the way across the Pacific to my Dad for his birthday. Nor, in the end, did I have the time to walk over to the Christian bookstore in Osaka to buy a Japanese copy of "Mere Christianity" to give to my troubled church friend: a secondary purpose of my visit. Instead, I had to rush back in order to get to Takako's on time, and even then I arrived fifteen minutes late or so.
The visit to Takako's house, however, did not turn out to be a waste of time. Aside from the very nice Japanese dinner that her mother-in-law cooked for us all, Takako and I had a good talk about my reasons for leaving Japan in the coming month of March, and, tangentially, about the impermanence and insecurity of life here in this world. The parting of friends is painful, and, like death, an unavoidable part of this life. But for the Christian, such partings, like death, are not without hope. And in the meantime we live in the knowledge that God supplies all our needs, including our needs for good friends. Here I was able to supply a personal example from my own coming to Japan, completely friendless, through the difficult time during which I became acutely aware of my need, to the present, in which God had supplied all my needs, often in very unexpected ways. It was hard at times, of course, being separated from my friends, but then no one ever said that the Christian life--or life in general, for that matter--would be easy. And through it all we have the confidence, as Christians, that our Heavenly Father is watching over us as we continue to seek His kingdom and His righteousness.
I left Takako's house rather later than I had intended, so that it was dark and cold out by the time I finally cycled home. This also meant that I had once again missed out on the free haircut that another of my student-friends had promised me: I had hoped to get it done that Monday night but at this late hour that was now rather obviously out of the question. Oh, well, I thought. My hair had waited this long: it wouldn't hurt for it to wait for one more week or so. I got home and, since I had planned most of my lessons for the next day while I had been slowly getting dressed and out of bed that morning, got undressed, into bed, and set my alarm for as late as I could possibly set it and still get to the nine o'clock pastor-teacher's meeting in some semblance of on time.
I didn't wake up to the usual persistent beeping of my alarm clock (set, as usual, as late as I could possibly set it and still be able to get to the nine o'clock teacher's meeting on time). Instead, I was shaken awake in the total darkness, surrounded by the shuddering and crashing of falling furniture, swaying superstructure, and breaking plates. In the chaos, it was all I could do to hold onto my moving bed and cry out, "Lord Jesus, protect me! Keep this house safe!" After a very long fifteen seconds, the shaking faded away and I was able to think. "Oh, God," I breathed, then formed the awe into a prayer as I began groping beside my bed in the darkness. My suitcase and clothes were in the way, pinned against my bed by something big, presumably the chest of drawers they had been sitting on top of. "Don't let my glasses be broken." I couldn't find them.
I sat up, crawled to the foot of my bed, and reached for my ski- jacket, thanking God that I kept a flashlight in it's pocket. The coat-rack wasn't there. I felt downwards, on the floor, and encountered a pile of books, with some clothing beneath them. My raincoat, a board, my summer jacket... There. The soft padding of my ski jacket. I pulled it out from under everything else, unzipped the pocket and took out my flashlight and, figuring that not enough gas could possibly have escaped yet to cause an explosion, turned it on.
My bookshelf lay in ruins before me, with my coats and the coat- pole beneath it. I turned back to the chest-of-drawers--and the extra sliding glass doors that I'd stored behind it--and thanked God that my bed, when it moved, had danced (breakdanced?) away from instead of beneath the heavy, fallen furniture. On the other side of my bed, sliding doors leaned crazily over Tim's bed in the next room. Thank God he was sleeping over at Furukawas'. I reached down and wrenched my suitcase out of the way and found my glasses--unbroken, thank God again--and put them on. Now I could find my way out of the house. But if I was going to go outside, I might as well pull on the jeans that were under my suitcase and put on my jacket and pull on some warm socks... If Fred were here, I thought as I dressed hurriedly, he would make a note of the time. I found my watch on my Bible, where I had left it, and wrapped it on. It was almost six.
An aftershock came on sometime during this time, but I just stayed put and held onto the bed. It had kept me safe before--it would do so again, especially now that all that could fall had now fallen. Except of course the house, but of course if that fell, there wouldn't be much that I could do about it--I was in no position to escape from it as of yet, nor, if I was, would I really be able to do so in time, I figured. I would just end up meeting my Maker a little sooner, that's all, was what I thought at the time.
Once dressed, I stepped off my bed for the first time, stretching over the pile of books on the floor and unlocked and opened my door. Another aftershock came, so I stayed where I was. Aftershocks were never as big as the first quake, and the house had survived the first one, and besides, I'd heard that doorways were safe places to be in an earthquake. It was a small one, and over soon, so I stepped out into the hallway and shone my flashlight up it.
The kitchen was a total mess. The refrigerator had fallen over and lay tilted and askew, propped up against the table with both doors open, while beneath it lay its contents and almost all the contents of my cupboards (which, strangely enough, were now closed), mingled with broken plates and glasses and other things. Anything that could have been broken was broken, and anything that wasn't attached to the walls had fallen down (except the table, upon which a cup cupboard and the refrigerator had both fallen). Fearful of gas leakages and of fires, I stretched my way over the refrigerator to step on a relatively safe box of rice curry, and made my way from there down the plant and planter-littered steep stairway.
I knew enough from TV and from the booklet on earthquakes that I had read (but hadn't bought) in the Real Canadian Superstore to know that the first thing that I was supposed to do was turn off the electricity and the gas. The only problem was that, for all my nine months of living here in Japan, I didn't know where either of the two switches were. Nor did a hasty flashlight-search reveal them. Not knowing what I should do next, I decided I had better ponder the problem outside. Besides, I thought I remembered seeing a gas meter or something like that in the carport beneath the church building where I lived.
Outside, in the pre-pre-dawn all-but-blackness was even less reassuring. The sidewalk at the bottom of the front steps was cracked and shattered. Huge rocks had fallen from the rock wall and onto the driveway down into the carport that they had once lined. In the carport I spotted the gas meter that I had thought I remembered seeing, but the blinking red light on it wasn't very reassuring either.
At this point, after a brief saunter across the road and into the park to use the public washroom there, I decided I had better go and see someone who knew and spoke Japanese. Perhaps they would know what to do. I set out for Pastor Sato's house. On one street my way was blocked by the ruins of an old house I had passed many times before. It had looked so old and run down that I had often wondered whether anybody still lived there, but I'd never found out. I remember thinking, as I picked my way past it, that if anybody did live there, I couldn't imagine them still being alive under that. But since I didn't KNOW if someone had lived in there, I wasn't about to risk my neck searching through all that rubble for people who might or might not exist. Later that day I saw them take a shrouded body from the building, put it in a van, and drive off.
The pastor and his family were all OK, and, with the pastor, I went to church school building and on the church. On the way there, we encountered the other English teachers from the church school, all of whom were also OK. One English teacher who had worked at our school, however, was not. She had stayed on in Japan to teach English elsewhere, and the house where she was staying collapsed in the quake. Another young man who was also living in that building somehow had enough presence of mind during the earthquake to jump out of the second- storey window before the house collapsed. He survived. The English teacher did not. They found her buried beneath all the rubble right beside her futon. The third person who had lived in that building had stayed over at a friend's house on the night of the earthquake, and so survived. But all of this we only learned later.
The church school building was fine. Though an old building, it was made of concrete and steel and so had weathered the quake fairly well. The old Japanese house just beside it, however, was not. What had once been a stately two-storey building was now less that a single storey high. Outside the collapsed Japanese house we met a bewildered young husband and wife. The house was their parents' home. Every now and then they would call out to their parents or look for some way of entering the collapsed structure, but there was no hope in their faces. Nor did I have any hope to offer them, even if I could have spoken their language--at least, not the sort of hope that they were looking for. So I said nothing. My fellow-teacher, Barb, who can almost speak the language at least tried to reassure them. "Maybe they're OK," she said to them in Japanese. It turned out later, however, that they were dead.
There seemed to be nothing that I could do to help the couple-- even the husband was only wandering tentatively about the ruins: no one knew how to go about actually getting in, or even whether there was much point in doing so. If any of us had heard a cry for help, that might have electrified us into action, but the utter silence stymied us. Pastor Sato had already gone on ahead to check on the church and the school, so, leaving the two women teachers with the bewildered wife, I went after him to see if there was anything I could do to help. It was on my way back home to the church, in a rubble-filled alleyway-- one that I normally walked through every day on my way to school--that I experienced what for me is still the most definitive encounter: the one that best typifies my experience of The Great Hanshin Quake.
There were other experiences, and other people: Route 2 clogged with people, cars, buses, bicycles, motor scooters and cycles, and trucks; leaning buildings; aftershocks; Takako's tears for her home and for normal life on my sweater. But for me, this one, one man calling hopelessly for his "Obaa-san. Obaa-san!", his child crying helplessly trapped behind him and grey with dust amidst the rubble, and that man waving off my incomprehensible offer of help as I climbed up hesitantly onto the ruin of his collapsed house--for me this experience summarizes and embodies my entire experience of The Great Kobe Quake of '95 (as the Japanese will probably call it in the future): one useless "gaijin", an outsider, present but unable to help those who needed help the most, when they most needed it. Walking away, I saw two groups of men running towards the collapsed house--or I hoped it was that house: there were so many collapsed all around--armed with sticks and shovels and hand-saws and looking purposeful and determined. It almost made me wish that the same thing might happen in my home-town, that I might, like them, then give someone the help that I should have, but couldn't give to that man, my hurting neighbour. Almost, even though I would never wish such a thing on my worst enemy, nor on Hitler's Germany. Almost. I now understand--though I still don't agree with--the Catholic notion of doing penance. One's past is a hard thing to live with.
As are one's limitations.

I feel as though I should end my story there, and perhaps that's where the story DOES end. But these are only the beginnings of my attempts to relate and to understand the significance of my experience (and others' experiences) of The Great Hanshin Earthquake (as the Japanese ended up calling it: Hanshin is the name of the area between and including Kobe and Osaka, where I live). And one of my biggest problems, as a thinker, has been trying to understand just how the earthquake fits into the rest of my experience of Life, the Universe, and Everything and just what God was trying to teach me through all of this. And I know there was at least one thing that I learned through my experience of the quake:
The first thing that the quake did was not so much to test, as to show me my faith. I am an intellectual: not so much by choice as by both nature and nurture. My first reaction to almost anything is to think about it. More than that, I am a Western intellectual, meaning that, with Descartes, my theoretical starting point is not even thought, but rather doubt. I doubt everything because, like all my Western intellectual compatriots, I have been trained to doubt, in university as in my culture. As Descartes put it, even before his more famous "Cogito": "Dubito ergo sum." I doubt, therefore I am. And yet, in the midst of that Japanese earthquake, I neither doubted nor thought. I simply clung to my bed and I prayed.
"Lord Jesus, protect me! Keep this house safe!"
What I experienced in those first fifteen seconds was unlike anything I have ever felt in my life. It was not fear: it was beyond emotion. Or perhaps it was like all emotion: every circuit in my brain all switched on. There might have been, somewhere in there, slightly more intense than all the other emotions, a fear of injury or of dying. There was, greatly to my surprise (afterwards, of course, not at that moment), no fear of death. I guess Christians--or I at least--are more fatalistic than they usually give themselves credit for: at that moment, my only thought of death was: if it comes, there is nothing I can do about it.
The other big problems that the quake posed to me intellectually were posed to me as a potential writer. The first was HOW do I capture and convey my experience of the earthquake, especially to people who have never experienced an earthquake themselves. Is it even possible? I wondered. A picture can only represent a small part of such a gigantic disaster; continuous videotape footage could capture more of it, but, watching videotape footage of the disaster myself, I found that on TV the viewer is always aware that the disaster is "out there" and that he is not really a part of the disaster--even when the disaster is all around him (as it was me), right outside the comforts and confines of his own partly quake-stricken home! And if this is what the best and the most graphic of our modern technology does, how can I hope to achieve any better with that most ancient of all technologies, mere words?
The answer that I found was, as I already more-than-fully described above, imagination. Words are, in fact, how we communicate almost everything, and, though imperfect, they are aided by the God- given faculty of imagination. So, with a potential newspaper audience in mind, I began to try and plumb the depth of my readers' imaginations with this:
It is dark, and unless you are a very early riser, you are asleep in your bed, or, if you are Japanese, on the floor in your futon. If you are a light sleeper, you awake to the very light tremors that preceded the quake. If you are a heavy sleeper, like me, you awake already being jolted and thrashed about by the earthquake itself. Anything that you have that is tall and high in your room topples over. If you have a small room, odds are that whatever is falling falls on you. Bookshelves, dressers, and free-standing closets--all those things that once made organizing your stuff so convenient--are especially dangerous at this time. Your ears are filled with the shuddering of the building, the bangs of things falling over, or out of cupboards, and with the crashing of plates. If you live in an older- style Japanese house you also hear the walls cracking. If you live in an old enough house, it collapses on top of you and you are either buried alive in pain and fallen timbers, or you are dead.
If you survive the initial quake and are not buried alive, you either make your way outside or stay crouched where you are, in stunned disbelief. If you are buried by furniture, you either push your way out from underneath it or wait (and perhaps call) for a roommate or a family-member to come and pull you out. If you have been buried beneath your house, waiting and calling is about all you are able to do. If you are dead, there's nothing much anyone else can do for you. But at least you'll be able to present your case for the unfairness of it all to your Maker in person.
Those of us who survived of course had no such luck. When we emerged from our houses or our apartment buildings (or from what was left of them), our eyes were met by boulders torn loose from earth retaining walls, by once-solid yard walls now cracked, bulging, or outright collapsed outwards, by cracks in the road wide enough to swallow a racing-bike tire, by cracks in the ground wide and deep enough, in places, to swallow a size twelve, high-top basketball shoe, cracks that ran in all directions, up walls, across roads, through fields, and under buildings, as though the very fabric of space-time itself had been coming apart.
Then, to try and convey the extent of the devastation caused by the quake:
Picture Kingsway, in Vancouver, near Metrotown, or some other such North American urban strip-development main street. Now fill in the spaces between the buildings with more buildings, and make most of the stores a half or a quarter the width of the average store on Kingsway and two storeys instead of one. Then stick in the odd high-rise, gas station, and modern multi-storey department store, wherever you can fit them, rewrite almost all of the store signs in Japanese (leave a few of the big neon ones in English), and put a few crowded, multi-storey condominiums in the background and you have a pretty good idea of the looks of Route 2: one of the main traffic arteries through the megalopolis of Hanshin, the area between and including the metropolis of Osaka and the busy port-city of Kobe.
Now take a drive down Route 2, or, rather, a bicycle ride, six days after the Great Hanshin Quake: a drive would get you nowhere very slowly at this point in time: the whole road--the two lanes going to Osaka, as well as the two lanes that are headed into Kobe--is completely clogged with traffic: cars and trucks of all sizes and designs, from the heavily-loaded big rigs, through various-sized tankers, all carrying water for the people of Kobe or leaving the city to fetch more, to grey police-buses, one-ton lorries, army jeeps, family cars, and four-wheel drive mini-vans. Perhaps the most ubiquitous, and certainly the fastest form of transportation are the swarms of motorcycles and motor-scooters that alternately conglomerate and spread out to thread through the more slowly-moving stream of cars, trucks, and heavy-construction machines. Rivalling the motorcycles and scooters for popularity, if not for speed, are fleets of bicycles, following the example of their motorized relatives, and occasionally joining with them when the density of the traffic slows them down, in weaving their way through the cars and trucks. The bicycles also weave their way in and among the hordes of pedestrians that cover both sidewalks and occasionally even venture out to make their way up and down the grassy meridian in the middle of the road--at least until they are waved off it and back onto the sidewalks by the white-helmeted baton-wielding policemen who are directing this chaos of traffic at the intersections.
And on every side of this slow-moving stream of clogged traffic, destruction. Some buildings are leaning: their walls have been torn from their foundations. Some are standing, but with windows broken (though these have been boarded up by now) or with big cracks and chunks missing from their drab-coloured sides, revealing crossworks of timber beneath the grey plaster. Apartment buildings go by which often appear, at first glance, to have survived the damage, but which usually, upon closer inspection, also turn out to have gaping cracks in key places. Here a balcony is sheared off, there two wings that were once joined have split apart from one another. A few buildings, especially some of the big, newer ones, seem to have escaped the devastation almost unscathed, but these few get fewer and fewer as you work your way up the road slowly into Kobe.
Then, on your left, without warning, you realize that you are passing a whole city block that has been levelled. The entire area is just one big pile of roofs and rubble. At the corner a TV crew is casually filming a helmeted rescue crew that is busy picking through, or perhaps clearing away the mountain of debris. Then, just as suddenly, the carnage gives way to a neat line of relatively undamaged shops and huge warehouses. Just a few cracks here and there, with the odd one leaning a little bit, nothing much to speak of. And then on your right you pass an entire row of shops that has toppled over and look up a narrow side street that has become even narrower because all the buildings are leaning crazily over it and snapped electrical wires are dangling, some even trailing along the cracked asphalt.
I never went in to Kobe proper, so I hesitate to describe the burnt-out Nigata ward that was apparently hardest-hit by the quake. But if the television pictures portray anything close to the reality, and if Nigata ward was anything like the Sannomiya arcades where I often went shopping (Sannomiya is another area in the city of Kobe), the area is unrecognizable. Indeed, judging from the television pictures, some areas of the city of Kobe look a lot like the film footage of the city of Hiroshima, shortly after the atomic bomb fell. But in other areas, I should also say, it looks almost like business as normal in Kobe, except for a relative lack of public transport and, consequently, of people (but that still means there's quite a few people around--this is Japan, after all: even a few people in a Japanese city would be a lot in a Canadian city).
But even as I wrote all of this, I began to run into the second major problem that the earthquake posed to me as a writer, the one with which as I began this portion of my epistle to you): WHY write about it? I found that I really didn't know WHY I was writing about the quake, for all the reasons that I described more completely above. This uncertainty has also been one of the main reasons why I produced so many different beginnings and styles in my various seemingly vain attempts to capture my experience of "The Great Hanshin Quake": not only did I not fully know WHAT I was trying to describe, I didn't even know exactly what I wanted to accomplish in my attempts to describe it. As a result, one of my various drafts of writing about the earthquake turned into a thought-essay that began exploring the question of why in the world I even WANTED to describe it:
How do you describe an earthquake to someone who's never been through one before? WHY do you describe an earthquake at all? Why is the evening news so successful, especially when there's some great disaster on? What is this strange fascination with disaster that we human beings have and where does it come from?
I am no exception to this strange phenomenon. When I turn on the TV and start flipping through the channels, I pause at the Indy racing coverage, hoping to see some spectacular car wreck. There. Did you see that? He almost lost control there for a couple of seconds. Wow! Did you see that move? That was riding the edge if I ever saw it! What a brilliantly dangerous manouev-- Oh. I hold my breath with the rest of the television audience as the car suddenly makes contact with the one beside it and unexpectedly spins out of control. Will he make it? Will he get out alive? Is this the end of the driver, or at least of his racing career? The car, at high speed, flips over the concrete guard-rail, bounces a couple of times and then bursts into flame as it comes to rest, the camera following its every move. But wait. He still might get out of it--here come the men with the fire extinguishers. The car explodes, and an indescribable feeling washes over the television audience. He didn't make it. The announcer comes on with a few seconds' reprise of the driver's life and his racing career. Then the cameras switch back to the Indy race, still continuing, now that orange flag has been lifted. The race must go on. The television audience shifts in its armchairs, sighs, and goes back to watching the race. Maybe something else interesting will happen. Or maybe they'll show a slow-motion replay of the disaster, perhaps with an expert analysis of what went wrong. And the race goes on.
Of course, the fascination with an Indy race crash only scratches the most superficial surface of our fascination with disaster and with "life on the edge". Not all of our interest in disaster is titillation--some is more innocent. I remember from my childhood, for example: "You were in the war, Grandad? What was it like?" He told me that it wasn't very interesting and that he hadn't seen very much: he had only been a woodcutter, behind the lines, and that war was horrible, not something glorious like in the story-books. But I still remember what little he told me about his experience of the war: how the axes had been dulled by the schrapnel in the trees, how a shell had once landed in their camp but hadn't gone off, how he'd cut a piece of the German cross from the wing of a wrecked Fokker tri-plane on a railway-car. I remember also what he told me about the dangers of logging: how he'd once chopped off three of his toes, how he'd had a friend of his die in his arms after a logging accident. He never went into much detail about any of these things, but even as a child I respected the fact that he hadn't lapsed into total silence on these things, that he'd at least attempted to tell me a little of what he'd been through. These were experiences that I hadn't had, that I might never have, that he had prayed that I'd never have, and all of these experiences of his that he told me about added a little to my understanding of life and a lot to my understanding of him as a person, though these last two were things that I only fully realized later, of course. Even his reluctance to go into detail about these adventures and disasters tells me a lot about who he was as a person.
Which brings me back to my own experience of The Great Hanshin Earthquake, as the Japanese media are now calling it. How much do I tell people? Why do I even bother telling them about it? Who am I as a person?
I am, by my character as well as by choice, a teacher, and I hope also a writer. I love words, or, to put it less flatteringly, like all teachers and writers, I love to hear myself speak. Since the earthquake, however, I have been a lot more silent than usual.
I am also by nature a rather serious and solemn sort of person. Since the earthquake, I have also been a lot more serious and solemn than usual.
I have seen death. I wrote, a while back in one of my serious and solemn philosophical letters to my friends back in Canada, that in coming to Japan I had experienced death, their deaths, because of the vast distance that so decisively separated me from them. But this is different: this is reality, that was only metaphorical. And this, in a metaphorical sense at least, was MY death that I saw, or close to it. And though the death that I actually saw with my eyes was not the death of my friends, but of strangers, it was not the less death because of that. And though I did not actually see any deaths actually taking place, the deaths that I saw were not the less solemn because of that. And yet life goes on.
That, perhaps, is the strangest part of all of this. And in this continuation of life, even of life as usual, in the midst of destruction and death is perhaps the key to riddle of why we human beings are so continually fascinated by disasters of every kind. In the midst of the most abnormal conditions, life continues.
And ceases. And it is the fine dividing line between these two conditions that is perhaps what fascinates us most about disaster.
In the earthquake, it is the stories of the close calls, the miraculous escapes from death that fascinate us most about this disaster. I was in my bed when the earthquake hit. I held onto it as it moved about in my shaking room, not knowing what else to do, and I prayed. The house stayed up, though many things inside the house fell down. My chest of drawers in my bedroom, and the heavy sliding glass doors that I'd stored behind it, were among the things that fell down. If my bed had been moved right instead of left by the quake, I would have been under them when they fell.
The sliding wooden doors that make up the right wall of my room also fell, but they fell onto my roommate Tim's bed, in the room next door, instead of onto mine. My roommate Tim was not sleeping at home in his bed when the quake hit. He was staying over at a Japanese friend's house.
One of my students was hit in the face by a falling bookshelf during the quake. (Books can be dangerous.) He was injured, but he lived. His aunt did not. Her house fell on her.
One of Tim's students also had her house fall on her, but she lived. She struggled amidst the rubble of her home for three hours before she finally made her way out of there on her own. Though she had a cracked rib, before she left the area she took the time to write Tim a letter and explain that she was OK but wouldn't be able to come to English class for a while.
One of our church members, who loves to read and whose father was in the hospital awaiting surgery, was actually buried by falling bookshelves and the books on them, but emerged from them mostly unhurt. She rushed over to the hospital to check on her father and was relieved to find that he was OK. Her father's only brother, however, was not. He and his wife and daughter were all killed in their beds when their house collapsed on them.
The father of another of our church members drives a truck. He was driving that morning and decided to stop for an orange light instead of racing through it, as usual. Seconds later, the earthquake struck and the elevated freeway in front of him collapsed where his truck would have been. As it was, only the dust from the freeway's collapse billowed over his truck.
The stories like this could go on and on. Everywhere the disaster had drawn its fine line. Most had lived, but many--more than 5000, as the ever-increasing body-count eventually revealed--had died. And many more had escaped death or injury by only a hair's breadth, or only a shelf-width, or only an intersection traffic light--and the list could go on and on. The Great Hanshin Quake was definitely a high-calibre disaster.
And yet, all of this does not answer the much more important question of Why? Why does this fine line between death and life always fascinate us so? Because it reveals so much about human character? I'm not so sure I like what it reveals about my character. After a single rebuff of my one feeble offer of help, I mostly gave up trying to help, on the day help was needed the most, because I didn't know the language and didn't know how to go about offering help. I didn't even see, except when it was just plain obvious, where help was needed the most. So much for intellect. So much for big talk about putting other people's interests before my own.
Yes, a disaster does reveal people's characters, both by putting their words to the test, and by its subsequent influence on their lives and world views. But that is perhaps not what fascinates us most about disasters. The fine line between death and life in a disaster almost always has nothing to do with people's characters.
As you can see, I never reached a single, solid conclusion in my essay. Nor, now that I think about it, is the fine line between death and life the only thing that fascinates us about these disasters. (I may have been a bit biased there by a few comments about that that Barb had made just before I sat down and wrote the exploratory essay.) The devastation, the grief, the horror, the continuation of a few semblances of normality amidst all the chaos wrought by the earthquake, heroism and human kindnesses--all of these things and more also hold our attention in a time like this. Perhaps it is the human reaction to the abnormal that fascinates us: one of the primary driving forces behind the whole field of fantasy and science fiction. But, whatever it is, I think I may have stumbled upon the key to the answer in the nature of the body of my essay. The main body of my essay is a collection of stories--stories concentrating on a single theme, but perhaps the theme is not really important here. Perhaps what is important is that, whatever it is that fascinates us, whether it be disasters or romance (and the two are not all that far apart), whatever it is, we tell stories about it. The dividing line, whether it be between death and life, love and hate, rags and wealth, or between failure and success, is not the only thing that fascinates us, it only adds to our interest. Aristotle might have called it conflict, and the state of mind that it created, suspense.
But these are only two elements in story development: character, setting, theme, and content, style of narration, and a whole host of other things all also contribute to our appreciation of and our interest in the stories about everything that we continue to tell to one another. And the strength of our fascination with any one of these elements determines the length of the story that can be hung on that element. Add more, and more interesting elements and you can have a longer, more interesting story. But here I begin to see a problem in my line of reasoning...
Perhaps one of the reasons that my analysis of our fascination with the story (an expansion from the initial fascination with disaster that I was concerned with--a disaster is simply a single instance of this much wider phenomenon) is that story-telling is simply a part of our human nature, just as much as it is a part of the nature of the One who created us in His image. For He too is a story-teller. He spoke, "Let there be light," and there was light. The worlds too were spoken into existence, as were we. Why did He create us? we may ask. In searching for that answer we will probably not be able get that much further than simply asking the question, I am afraid. Most likely the best that we can do is to say, Because He is creative. He didn't NEED us, at least not in the sense that we usually think of as need. But He obviously WANTED us--if God hadn't wanted us, we wouldn't be here. Nothing could force GOD to create us, not if it was against His will to do so. So, perhaps we can go a single step further and say that God's creation of us was an act of love, springing out of His character as a creative, loving person. Is that a step further? Perhaps, perhaps not. Perhaps you can tell me whether it is.
We might also be able to glean a bit more insight from the quote C.S. Lewis is supposed to have liked in the movie "Shadowlands": "We read to know we are not alone." The same could also be said of conversation, or of almost any speech. And the importance of not being alone can also be seen in the birth of Creation. "It is not good for man to be alone," the Creator said, "so I will make a helper suitable for him." And then Adam and Eve were told to be fruitful and multiply. Like his Creator, man is supposed to extend the nature and the range of his fellowship, and we do this (primarily, and again like God) with our words.
But, there is such a thing as too many words, and I seem, more and more, to be running into that problem these days as the overwhelming initial impact of the quake fades into past history. So, I will close with my only poem (so far) inspired by the earthquake:
Words from the broken earth sirens wail repairs like a snail going backward single hammer and nail in the midst of a quake-fractured city Will this ever end? hearts that fail in the midst of this hell- desolation there's a well flowing freely: crushed grape blood from a shattered wine shop and I find consolation in the tears of a friend.