The Earth Alive

By the secret force.

Americans for some years have been preoccupied with disasters of man's own making: Viet Nam and Watergate, pollution and terrorism. That preoccupation could produce a form of hubris--the idea that men, often enough Americans, so command the planet that they must be to blame when events collapse into tragedy. Viewed from this perspective, disaster must always be attended by accusation and guilt.

The devastating earthquakes in China, the Colorado flood, the mysterious ailment that struck the American Legionnaires in Philadelphia--all suggest a more fundamental, and realistic, perspective. It would be banal to say that such demonstrations of nature's awesome force restore man's humility. Still, it is worth repeating the thesis of French Biologist Jacques Monod that events --and mostly the event of life itself--are profoundly random.

Earthquakes, floods and fugitive diseases are, at any rate, random evidence that the earth itself is mysteriously and sometimes wildly alive. That somehow added to the metaphysical fascination of watching the Americans' Viking lander scratch around in the rusty Martian soil to see if that world, too, had been visited by the secret force.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.