[extropy-chat] Putting the tsunami into context

[scerir]

From: "Damien Broderick"

> a brief crisis of belief when the earthquake
> of Lisbon, on All Saints' Day, 1755, destroyed
> thirty thousand people in six minutes.

http://nisee.berkeley.edu/images/servlet/KozakBrowse?eq=5234
It is an interesting, huge collection of views (many are
imaginative) of that (9° Richter!) earthquake, followed
by a tsunami, and then (!) by the famous fire of Lisboa.

"Contemporary reports state that the earthquake
lasted between three-and-a-half to six minutes,
causing gigantic fissures five meters wide to rip
apart the city centre. The survivors rushed to the
open space of the docks for safety and watched
as the water receded, revealing the sea floor,
littered by lost cargo and old shipwrecks.
Tens of minutes later an enormous tsunami
engulfed the harbour, and the city downtown."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1755_Lisbon_earthquake

It seems possible that the meaning of "saudade"
(nostalgia, spleen) is deeply entangled with that
disaster. Actually there is, also, an interesting,
unespected meaning of "saudade". That is nostalgia
of the future, not of the past. Or, to say it better,
a nostalgia of what our life (and their city, Lisboa)
could have been. And it is not.