Once you have been in an earthquake you know, even if you survive without a scratch, that like a stroke in the heart, it remains in the earth's breast, horribly potential, always promising to return, to hit you again, with an even more devastating force.
Interpretation
Surviving an earthquake leaves a lasting impression of its potential dangers, reminiscent of deep-seated fears.
This quote by Salman Rushdie captures the profound psychological impact that experiencing an earthquake can have on a person's consciousness. Even if one escapes physically unharmed, the fear and anxiety about the unpredictable power of nature linger on, suggesting that such an experience changes one’s perception of safety and vulnerability in the world around them. The metaphor of the earth 'breast' holding a 'stroke in the heart' implies a deep connection between humanity and nature's potential for destruction, reminding us that the threat may always exist beneath the surface, ready to resurface with possibly greater intensity.
In practice
In a lecture about natural disasters, one could use this quote to emphasize the psychological effects of surviving disasters.
I've been fascinated by Machiavelli since I was very young. I've always felt that he had a bad rap from history, and that he was actually a person quite unlike what we now think of as Machiavellian. He was a republican. He disliked totalitarian government.
Killing people because you don't like their ideas - it's a bad thing.
faith without doubt is addiction
I am clearly vulnerable to these more passionate and volatile unstable relationships. I am trying to not be so vulnerable.
In India, as elsewhere in our darkening world, religion is the poison in the blood. Where religion intervenes, mere innocence is no excuse. Yet we go on skating around this issue, speaking of religion in the fashionable language of 'respect.' What is there to respect in any of this, or in any of the crimes now being committed almost daily around the world in religion's dreaded name?
Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems - but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible.
If we do not act to curb climate change immediately, we will leave our children and grandchildren an unrecognizable planetIt is the poor, those least responsible for climate change and least able to afford adaptation, who would suffer the most.
As a child, I was aware of the widely-held attitude that the ocean is so big, so resilient that we could use the sea as the ultimate place to dispose of anything we did not want, from garbage and nuclear wastes to sludge from sewage to entire ships that had reached the end of their useful life.
I wait. Now the night flows back, the mighty stillness embraces and includes me; I can see the stars again and the world of starlight. I am twenty miles or more from the nearest fellow human, but instead of loneliness I feel loveliness. Loveliness and a quiet exultation.
We seem wired to grieve with greenery. Allowing the dead to dissolve into the earth, to become part of the cycle of the seasons, has, for millennia, held the promise of cheating mortality.
Some days in late August at home are like this, the air thin and eager like this, with something in it sad and nostalgic and familiar.
For every human illness, somewhere in the world there exists a plant which is the cure.
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