THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, August 27, 1995 TAG: 9508240272
SECTION: CAROLINA COAST PAGE: 54 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
SOURCE: Ronald L. Speer
LENGTH: Medium: 74 lines
With Felix still a fresh memory, and the eastern reaches of the Atlantic spawning a bountiful crop of would-be hurricanes, I'm reminded from our precarious perch on the coast of an old Greek saying:
When a rock falls on an egg, poor egg. When an egg falls on a rock, poor egg.
That pitiless proverb prompted me to thumb the pages of my favorite book, ``Bartlett's Familiar Quotations,'' to see what other memorable sayings seem to fit the summer of '95.
There's not a lot of references to hurricanes, but a passage in Shakespeare's King Lear is right on target:
Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow!
You cataracts and hurricanes, spout
Till you have drench'd our steeples, drown'd the cocks!
The Bard also provided a bit of data that would be at home on the Weather Channel when he noted:
Small showers last long, but sudden storms are short.
He'd obviously never heard of Felix, who hung around for days before deciding to take his terror elsewhere.
For a vivid description of a hurricane, you can't beat Matthew Arnold. In an 1849 essay called ``The Forsaken Merman,'' Arnold put readers on the scene as clearly as do the television cameras of today:
Now the great winds shoreward blow
Now the salt tides seaward flow.
Now the wild white horses play,
Champ and chafe and toss in the spray.
I love that line about the wild white horses. Watch the surf in a big storm and you can see the spirited steeds running and jumping.
My all-time favorite line also could have been prompted by a hurricane.
It was a dark and stormy night.
That was first written 155 years ago by an English baron, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, as the opening line in a play.
Contemporary cartoonist Charles Schultz made the line famous by having Charlie Brown's dog, Snoopy start every story he writes by saying:
It was a dark and stormy night. Suddenly a scream pierced the air. . .
I can't think of a better way to tell about a hurricane, unless you're one of those earthy Russian writers who dare Mother Nature to do her best. That's what Maxim Gorki did by writing, in the Song of a Stormy Petrel:
Let the storm rage ever stronger.
Poet Carl Sandburg also knew about seeking shelter from the elements. In ``The People, Yes,'' the American Pulitizer Prize winner wrote:
The people know the salt of the sea
and the strength of the winds
lashing the corners of the earth.
The people take the earth
as a tomb of rest and a cradle of hope.
There's hope, too, in a light-hearted line by playwright Alan Jay Lerner, who in ``My Fair Lady'' wrote:
In Hertford, Hereford and Hampshire, hurricanes hardly happen.
As a sailor, I watch approaching hurricanes with the elation of a man not far out at sea but safely ashore while the mighty winds roar and waves the size of mountains race across the Atlantic.
And I think, as do many other sailors and watermen, of that classic prayer first offered by French fishermen:
O God, thy sea is so great, and my boat is so small.
With apologies to the Revolutionary patriots of Bunker Hill, I'd like to add my own philosophy about hurricanes to the storm warnings handed down over the centuries:
If hurricanes are coming, DON'T wait till you can see the whites of their eyes. by CNB