The way things appear in the instant before they go under: first assured, then shipwrecked. The ease with which facts presumed permanent can change. There was dry land, once, and also the concept of drowning as emergency, a thing to be thrashed against. Now there is simply inevitability, the narrowing gaps between floodplains, islands of viable space on which people build doggedly, insistently, upward, away from the mess below. There is a horror movie adage that people are always running up stairs when they should be jumping out of windows, but what is a person supposed to do when all obvious
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