AN OUTSIDE PSYCHOLOGIST WHO’D been visiting Alaska that Easter weekend later wrote an article describing how uncannily his experience of the disaster mirrored the description of another earthquake, written a half century earlier by the psychologist and philosopher William James. James was a New Englander who—similarly by chance—had been visiting California when the great San Francisco earthquake struck in April 1906. James astutely chronicled its aftermath in an essay he called “On Some Mental Effects of the Earthquake.”
