Thunder
and lightning shortly before six set the block aflame and rocking this morning.
With the curtain unable to stretch to the end window-pane the light streaked
ahead of the claps along the opposite wall like a visitation of some kind.
Somehow it was a comforting and welcome wakening. Even had the tower suffered
an extraordinary hit and we were all buried in the rubble there would have been
little cause for lament. The French urbanist, as he calls himself, Paul
Virilio, delivers in one of his books what was for him a telling anecdote
concerning a space crew in orbit which fell into imminent danger at one point
and needed to choose between either a burn-out crash-landing on earth, or else
onward unguided flight until their reserves were exhausted. The decision in
this case was made for a fiery grave on the home planet. In Singapore in the
midst of these concrete towers with their narrow garden-beds and swept
walk-ways—another dark foreign worker yesterday using a blower to dislodge
stray leaves entangled in the bushes of a garden strip—the threatening hot
spear of Zeus seemed welcome intrusion.
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