New Yorkers should not imagine that events in the Caribbean are some distant, intangible event: we live on an island, one that has been flooded very recently, and the bad weather is getting worse. Hurricane season has not disrupted life in the northeast this year, but it very well may next year, and beyond; may disrupt that routine beyond repair. Our world has become biblical, except without a faith in the Lord; floods and famines descend with wrath, a blind wrath from an empty throne. I can’t ride the subway each morning, ride, in fact, under great bodies of water, without consider the absurd fragility of the system that makes such travel possible. Thousands of Puerto Ricans are wading through raw sewage this morning, and a few weeks ago they thought they had escaped the worst storm in recent memory. Already, too, the news cycle has left Houston and Florida behind. We keep tricking ourselves into thinking that normality follows in the wake of disaster, like sunrise after sunset; but of course it does not. Normality returns only in a phantom form; weaker and weaker after each disruption. It becomes harder to pretend, it becomes harder to believe, in the progress of humankind. Progress is a leaf on the tree of life, easily torn, easily scattered.