March 20

I just watched another YouTube post of the tsunami in Japan, this one footage from a dashboard cam (supposedly the driver survived) as the first wave crested over a coastal freeway and briefly submerged the vehicle, before washing it into the strip mall adjacent. Not long after, I checked in at one of my favorite blogs, only to find that the suffering and environmental devastation in Japan has caused the blogger to cease writing -- protesting the self-centered, individualistic triviality of the blogosphere. Most of my favorites have continued in some way discussing Japan, which in various ways has captured attention from the world less noticeable after the quake in New Zealand. And grief, and sorrow. Anger.

The scientists have weighed in, the seismologists and the oceanographers, the ones who predicted the eventuality of such an earthquake as Japan's. And the deep -- really, bone-shaking -- origins of Earth's periodic shudders are unavoidable, ineluctable, time-transcendent. The tiny people flee from the scale of the Creation.