BLDGBLOG: Lights Among The Ruins

BLDGBLOG: "Based on an eyewitness account written by an Allied Air Commander, Sebald then refers to 'the terrible and deeply disturbing sight of the apparently aimless wanderings of millions of homeless people amidst the monstrous destruction, [which] makes it clear how close to extinction many of them really were in the ruined cities at the end of the war.' For some reason the next line just haunts me: No one knew where the homeless stayed, although lights among the ruins after dark showed where they had moved in. Which leads me to ask myself whether it's simply a factor of my age – I'm not exactly getting younger here – though I do drink a lot of orange juice – or if it's something more closely related to the weirdly militarized political climate in which we now live, but I've started to react to things like this with a kind of concentrated studiousness, as if reading – absurdly – for advice on how to survive my own generation's coming, perhaps even more calamitous, future. What 'monstrous destruction' of world war and oil shortages and global terror and climate change might we, too, have to face someday? In twenty years' time will I be out holding up some pathetic light among the ruins of a destroyed city, wondering where my wife is, dying of thirst, deaf in one ear, covered in radiation burns? Or is that just a peculiarly American form of pessimist survivalism? Or do I just read too much Sebald?"

Whoa.