Shelter From The Storm

It is one of those little coincidences that as ‘post-tropical storm’ Sandy made landfall, I had just been reading the following passage from John Steinbeck’s Travels With Charley:

“…And about that time hurricane Donna was reported tramping her way out of the Caribbean in our direction. On Long Island’s tip, we have had enough of that to be highly respectful. With a hurricane approaching we prepare to stand a siege…

…The wind struck on the moment we were told it would, and ripped the water like a black sheet. It hammered like a fist…The trees plunged and bent like grasses, and the whipped water raised a cream of foam…”

The tradition of natural disasters in American literature is something of a leitmotif. At Leeds, I remember taking a module called ‘America Inundated: Floods and other scourges in US fiction’, where we looked at brilliant novels like Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

What holds these novels together is the belief that in the midst of danger and widespread destruction, the protagonists of these stories manage in some regards to transcend the difficulties of their circumstances and rise to the challenge.

That is what we can hope to see as the East Coast rebuilds - communities coming together to help out the victims of this disaster. Our thoughts are with them as they recover and I would like to close with a word from Aesop:

“The little reed, bending to the force of the wind, soon stood upright again when the storm had passed over.”