From the Editor

What can you do about a hurricane?  Like Isabel off the port bow?  Prayer?  Petition?  Preparation?  Patience?  Stay with the four P's or add something else?  Perhaps share a flashlight.  Perhaps write a novel -- Typhoon, Lord Jim, The Perfect Storm -- to imagine the storm's consequence far beyond downed trees and a few shingles blown off the roof -- to imagine God's payback through a natural disaster. What did we do to deserve such high winds?

Dark clouds festoon the edges of our imaginations.  And our fears defy measure.  We take comfort in the 12 foot storm surge, the 9 inch rain, the 70 mile per hour wind, the 100 million dollars damage.  We make the rational nightmare add up, the fear nothing more than an engineering/economic model.  But what of the natural disaster in us?  How do we measure the storm-wrecked life?  Imagine Romeo and Juliet, Janie and Teacake, Stella and Stanley.  Passions without kind or number are given shape in the press of the imagination -- Dorian Gray, Gatsby, Willy Loman, Lady MacBeth -- characters that mold the plastic fears in us.

We imagine our fears in infinite ways; the modern temper gives us that freedom.  To indulge our fears and call it culture, art, politics, we take more comfort in the proportions of the horrible than the relief of being mistaken about what our imaginations can measure.  After all, that's what the movie maxim says:  it's much more frightening when we don't actually see the monster.  Unfortunately, we are not as adept at imagining the Good.  While searching for the white whale, all we can come up with are Ahabs, and Starbucks, and Ishmaels.  Our inventions range from the obsessive-compulsive, to the passive-aggressive, to the non-person worm who can only bear witness and call it duty. When the very stunning whale finally makes its cameo appearance, we miss the quiet detail that it is a member of the kindliest species on the planet.

When we imagine something Good, we criticize it for its lack of authenticity, complain that it doesn't have that ring of truth, or theorize the goodness out of it by asking, "Exactly whose Good are you talking about?  It's not my Good, Pal! Oh yeah? Good in whose century? Oh yeah!  You know what you can do with that" ... ad nauseum.

Maybe that's why we are much more at ease with down and dirty Evil -- bad is something we can agree on more readily.  At least, there's less at stake if you overestimate the monster than overestimate the power of Fred Rogers or a sunny day.  Underwhelming good is a comfortable pose.  Imagining the worst and getting less than what one imagines is much like winning the lottery.  But you have to wonder about the long term effect of such a mindset.  If we didn't have weapons of mass destruction, we would have to invent them; if we didn't have natural disasters, we would be nervous wrecks!  Thar' she blows!