Nov

2018

Paradise Lost, again and again

I can’t help wondering how British poet John Milton would have written about the fires in California. In the opening lines of his greatest epic, Paradise Lost,he describes the Hell into which a rebellious Satan fell:

“As one great Furnace flam'd, yet from those flames

No light, but rather darkness visible

Serv'd only to discover sights of woe,

Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace

And rest can never dwell, hope never comes

Still urges, and a fiery Deluge, fed

With ever-burning Sulphur unconsum'd…”

Milton’s description from 1667 seems prophetic.

Paradise has been lost again – this time the town of some 26,000 residents in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountain range in central California. As I write these words, 63 people have been confirmed dead; 600 are missing; over 11,000 structures reduced to ashes.

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Categories: Sharp Edges

Tags: Fire, Paradise, California, Eden, Eve

Sep

2018

Brazil’s national lobotomy

Author: Jim Taylor

The video images of flames shooting skyward out of the National Museum of Brazil, in Rio de Janeiro, stabbed me in the heart.

I spent close to 20 years alternating between president, secretary, and grunt volunteer with the infinitely smaller Lake Country Museum. I know from personal experience how hard it is to document the past, especially from societies that maintained no written texts.

Every artifact, every letter, every story, is like a clue in a mystery novel. Clue by laborious clue, a museum puts together a coherent picture of what life was like, back then -- whenever “then” was.

The Rio fire, in effect, ripped out almost all the pages from the novel about South America.

How can you read a novel that isn’t there any longer?

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Categories: Sharp Edges

Tags: museum, Fire, lobotomy, Brazil, Rio de Janeiro, artifacts

Jul

2017

The possibility of losing everything

Author: Jim Taylor

It would be hard not to write about a traumatic event – even if it works out all right in the end.

Last weekend, the forest fire that ravaged parts of Okanagan Centre forced Joan and me to abandon our home on 15 minutes’ notice. It was an oddly liberating experience.

We were lucky to have 15 minutes. One couple I talked with had less than two minutes. “I looked out my window and saw the flames shooting up the trees at the end of our yard,” she said. “We just ran out the door and into our car.”

She assumed that their home was gone. She seemed astonishingly calm about it.

Eight homes burned; about 30 others suffered damage.

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Categories: Sharp Edges

Tags: Fire, evacuation, Okanagan Centre

Jim Taylor's Columns - 'Soft Edges' and 'Sharp Edges'

Paradise Lost, again and again

Brazil’s national lobotomy

The possibility of losing everything

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