Wednesday, February 15, 2006
With the centenary anniversary of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake just a shade more than two months off, the defining event of the city's history rests uneasily on a combined spiritual fault line. Obsession and avoidance, fascination and aversion sit side by side, like tectonic cups unconscious of the other's presence and pressure. We think about the day the Earth shook the city into submission and we don't think about it, ignore it and see it wherever we look.
Quake seekers could board on a sustained seismic pilgrimage into the past, if they chose to, suffusing 2006 with the destruction, grief and forbearing pluck of 1906. Many others, it's safe to assume, will want nothing to do with this mixed-message festival of an event that killed thousands and destroyed much of the city. Doesn't the world supply plenty of that as it is, one might ask, without excavating past woes?
Quake seekers could board on a sustained seismic pilgrimage into the past, if they chose to, suffusing 2006 with the destruction, grief and forbearing pluck of 1906. Many others, it's safe to assume, will want nothing to do with this mixed-message festival of an event that killed thousands and destroyed much of the city. Doesn't the world supply plenty of that as it is, one might ask, without excavating past woes?
posted by wilson @ 9:34 PM
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