The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Monday, March 25, 2024

Diary: The Friday before last I was in bed having a bit of a hard time sleeping. I was hearing what I thought were one of those long YouTube videos of rain. I thought Cheryl was playing one–she has trouble sleeping–though usually she plays her meditation sounds through her airpods. Maybe their juice had run out. Maybe she was playing it from the phone. I covered my ear with a pillow and went back to sleep. The sounds continued, and then there was what sounded like the rockets that used to hit our building back in Beirut, that muffled crackling thud accompanied by tremors. I got up. I opened the bedroom door. It was not the YouTube video. It was water streaming through my upstairs and down through the floor and ceiling below. The thudding sound was a bunch of ceiling tiles crashing. Half the living room was a waterfall. one of the couches was covered in drywall. Somehow, the bookshelves had for the most part been spared, though a couple of them were struck by falling skies too. It was not yet 4 a.m. It was impossible to close the source of the flood, the pipe incoming to the upstairs bathroom, and neither of us knew how to turn off the water main. Well, we knew: we had two places. But the one in the garage wouldn’t turn. It had atrophied over the past 15 years. The one outside, where I dug in the darkness, I didn’t dig deep enough, and wouldn’t have known what to do had I gotten there. It was two hours later that we finally got it shut off. ServePro invaded at 6 and was here until about 2 p.m. They made a desert and didn’t yet call it dry. I exaggerate a little: the living room was made a desert, its carpeting ripped out down to the concrete, and my beloved reading room upstairs had part of its carpeting ripped out, though I’ve come to think that was a bit of overkill. Four humidifiers and fans a friend compared to the propellors of B-29s were left on 24/7, as a moisture reader from Lowe’s showed the moisture fall over the days–very quickly for the floors, a bit slower for the affected walls, but still. Outside, we had one of those piles of flooded out furniture that I had seen lining up the avenues of Flagler Beach in the aftermath of Hurricane Ian in 2017, though our pile was child’s play in comparison. Next will be the drywalling, then the painting, then the flooring. I’ve had a few bouts of despondency, but self-despondency in our case is self-indulgent: the damage is  relatively slight. It is more discomfort than damage, more of an infuriating expense–an expense that could have been prevented with the $50 water alarms I have since bought–than a more substantial loss. And not a day goes by without reports in one news source or another of people losing homes, getting bombed out of homes, getting evicted from homes, seeing their homes wash away. That I could write these lines to the sound of fans, a few feet from where water was streaming only those few days ago, tells you how–not to be mawkish or falsely, stupidly, providentially pious about it, which would be the real upchuck–all told, it may not have been luck, but it was not the catastrophe it seemed to be when I woke up to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Waters in my own home.

—P.T.

XXX

 

View this profile on Instagram

 

FlaglerLive News Service, Palm Coast (@flaglerlive) • Instagram photos and videos

The sack of Constantinople is unparalleled in history. For nine centuries the treat city had been the capital of Christian civilization. It was filled with works of art that had survived from ancient Greece and with the masterpieces of its own exquisite craftsmen. The Venetians indeed knew the value of such things. Wherever they could they seized treasures and carried them off to adorn the squares and churches and palaces of their town. But the Frenchmen and Flemings were filled with a lust for destruction. They rushed in a howling mob down the streets and through the houses, snatching up everything that glittered and destroying whatever they could not carry, pausing only to murder or to rape, or to break open the wine-cellars for their refreshment. Neither monasteries nor churches nor libraries were spared. In St Sophia itself drunken soldiers could be seen tearing down the silken hangings and pulling the great silver iconostasis to pieces, while sacred books and icons were trampled underfoot. While they drank merrily from the altar-vessels a prostitute set herself on the patriarch’s throne and began to sing a ribald French song. Nuns were ravished in their convents. Palaces and hovels alike were entered and wrecked. Wounded women and children lay dying in the streets. For three days the ghastly scenes of pillage and bloodshed continued, till the huge and beautiful city was a shambles. Even the Saracens would have been more merciful, cried the historian Nicetas, and with truth.

–From Steven Runciman’s A History of the Crusades, vol. 3 (1954).

The Cartoon and Live Briefing Archive.