a kind of terror / at the chain / of events
I spent many a Friday night, fifteen years ago, writing about banks that failed.
Another bank failed on Friday, as financial institutions sometimes do, and there I was again. Plus ça change, etc and indeed.
News repeats, because people make the same kinds of decisions over and over again.
‘People like to be told what they already know. Remember that. They get uncomfortable when you tell them new things. New things…well, new things aren’t what they expect. They like to know that, say, a dog will bite a man. That is what dogs do. They don’t want to know that a man bites a dog, because the world is not supposed to happen like that. In short, what people think they want is news, but what they really crave is olds.’ — Terry Pratchett, The Truth (2000)
Attribution:
There is no gentle sense to this.
Is there?
Only a kind of terror
at the chain
of events, the scale of loss, the ordered
destruction one against the other—
all that something larger
awaits its moment.
— from Woman Watches Ocean on a Reef through a Glass-Bottomed Boat by Angela Jackson