From Sophie's front desk — Sunday, July 12
The New York Times — read the full story
A note came in over the wire Tuesday about a wildfire that tore through Andalusia. The Times reports at least a dozen dead, with Spain calling it one of the deadliest fires in decades. Victims found burned in their vehicles while attempting to flee — about twenty more missing, temperatures near forty Celsius. HIL-de-gard of Bingen speaks first, then Seneca.
I fought Abbot Kuno for ten years to free my nuns from Dih-SIB-o-den-berg , a cage of will, though it felt like stone. The day we left, the land was still alive: water in the springs, green in the meadows.
Twelve people in vehicles this week ran into fire and could not run out; they died in a landscape that had already died. The dryness had eaten the green so completely that flight became a trap.
The fire moved fast, but the corruption — the sih-kih-tass, the withdrawal of the life-giving power — ... had already stopped them.
the northern wind with diverse annual solstices, one from the south to the north raises, another from the north to the south gradually depresses. You see also that from the day on which the days begin to lengthen, the aforementioned southern wind with its collateral winds the sam…
up to its setting in the north wind, which the light of the sun neither touches nor illuminates, they resist; for the north wind is worse than the other winds, since in the fall of the devil, when God cast him into the outer darkness, where he remains in darkness without any ligh…
Indeed in the east, in the south, in the west, and in the north the firmament is driven to rotation by the winds. But the lucid fire of it, while it is overcome by the humor of the lower water through the disposition and judgment of God, so that in a certain manner it ceases from…
and they afflict, and finally towards the end of the world they will suffer many hardships in their narrowness. On the outer part of which, around the circuit, there is a bright fire, as if having a shadowy skin beneath it: it designates that God burns those who are outside the t…
itself touches; and after it has been reduced to ashes, if anything of it remains, that man should leave it, and take its ashes and the ashes of the charcoal through which it was burned, and reserve them in a linen cloth. Then if any man swells up in his body, he should put that …
Kuno's cage was stone laid down by a man's will , you could feel the edges, resist the hand. SIH-kih-tass petrifies from inside. The land does not betray you with a wall; it betrays you by becoming dead, and you discover too late you cannot move through stone that was once green. When my nuns and I left Dih-SIB-o-den-berg, we fled a person's refusal. Those people in Spain fled a world's refusal , the earth itself had stopped giving. One petrification you can see; the other you mistake for your own exhaustion until the flames find you motionless in the ash.
The fire took their bodies. The sih-kih-tass took their world first , withered the roads, cracked the earth, burned away the green that would have held them. In my Physica I wrote of how the roots of plants fail when the moisture leaves; the plants do not choose to die of dryness... but they cannot live in it. These twelve were roots in soil that had already turned to ash. The flames were only the visible witness to what had already been killed.
The escape is not flight but work,the hands in the earth, the body remembering what the soul has forgotten. When the interdict fell on us and they silenced my music, the sih-kih-tass was complete: no singing, no bells, the soul's greening stopped in the middle of a word... But I went to my garden. I ground the fennel and the wormwood. I taught the young women to see in each root the same power I saw burning in the first vision,not safe, not tame, but alive, speaking, green beneath the bark. SIH-kih-tass feeds on despair that nothing can be tended. The moment you tend — the moment you refuse the drought by touching what grows — you have already begun to answer it. The fire may take the forest. But the seed knows what the ash remembers.
The dead in the cars didn't fail to escape. The fire came faster than escape is possible.
In Nero's amphitheater, I watched crowds die trapped between barriers and the crowd. This is the same shape , infrastructure meant to hold people (route out, time to flee, fire season) compresses into something too narrow.
Twelve dead, twenty-three missing sounds like exception. It isn't.
In Corsica, I learned how the land sustaining life for centuries turns hostile in a year. Spain is learning that now.
48. Constantly consider how many physicians are dead and gone, who frequently knitted their brows over their patients; how many astrologers, who foretold the deaths of others with great ostentation of their art; how many philosophers, who wrote endlessly on death and immortality;…
they turned to rout. In later days this storm was said to have been sent in answer to the prayers of a legion which contained many Christians, and the name Thundering Legion should be given to it on this account. The title of Thundering Legion is known at an earlier date, so this…
a state of security? Well then suppose that my friends have died in the places which are far from me. What else have they suffered than that which is the condition of mortals? Or how are you desirous at the same time to live to old age, and at the same time not to see the death o…
a state of security? Well then suppose that my friends have died in the places which are far from me. What else have they suffered than that which is the condition of mortals? Or how are you desirous at the same time to live to old age, and at the same time not to see the death o…
subsist without it. 43. Time is a river, a violent torrent of things coming into being. Each one, as soon as it has appeared, is swept away: it is succeeded by another which is swept away in its turn. 44. All that happens is as natural and familiar as a rose in spring, or fruit i…
The shape is eternal because we build for the ordinary, not the catastrophic. The amphitheater was designed for crowds to flow, to sit, to rise,all in order. No one designs for thirty thousand panicked at once. When I was recalled from Corsica, I asked the builders why the harbor had one exit, not three. They said: it works, most days. It works until it doesn't. Spain's roads funnel people the same way,efficient, narrow, controlled. A route works beautifully until it becomes a trap. We repeat this because efficiency and redundancy are enemies, and we always choose efficiency. We forget that infrastructure's real test is not the day it functions... but the day it fails.
Speed is useless once the route closes. I had years in Corsica,years, Lucilius, to prepare for loss. It didn't matter that the water crossed quickly or that I understood the map. Planning assumes the world will hold still long enough to be read... But when the fire moves faster than thought — when what was a road at dawn is ash by noon — both the careful and the quick die the same death. The real killer isn't speed or planning. It's the moment you realize the ground itself has abandoned you, and there is nowhere left to run.
The land was always changing, Lucilius,but I cannot tell you if it changes faster than before. A man measures only fifty years; I was in Corsica through drought and then through rain, and thought I understood the cycle. One oscillation, or the start of a deeper break? I have no data older than my own watching. What I know now: a fire that traps twenty-three people in their cars, kills twelve by noon,that is not the rhythm I was trained to expect. Speed is the killer.
The story ran in the New York Times. Fire travels faster than evacuation, and in Spain yesterday that margin of seconds meant the difference between life and death — ... that's Old News for today.