History

The awful earthquake rocked China and shocked everybody. It was unnerving for me to hear the news from Sichuan because I had just read the chapter of earthquake from Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything two weeks ago.

They may seem more than simply coincidence. There is a feeling, as creepy as that delivered by one of the most intense earthquakes (at Lisbon, Portugal) in recorded history, that my reading the quake chapter presages the disaster mystically. A sign of omen or prophecy? Do I deserve to be called a highly gifted and clairvoyant genius who is foretelling an earthquake?

Of course, that may turn out to be a self-fulfilling fallacy when we sit down to think about it. It is worth remembering that history always repeats itself: the devastating earthquakes in Tokyo, Turkey, Mexico, to name but a few.

And, that is exactly the reason I read the book A Short History of Nearly Everything, no more and no less.