BPR 53 | 2026
Riding on a cloud, Pythagoras
surveyed the anxious turmoil down below.
Lucretius from a similar height too:
“How sweet to contemplate a storm-tossed sea.”
We know too much. We do not know enough.
We peer down, down,
try to envision the submersible
imploding halfway to the ocean’s floor.
Five passengers. And more—and hundreds more—
lost when a listing overcrowded boat
packed with people hoping for a haven
capsized. What we can’t see
we can imagine—cannot not imagine.
Are we complicit? And where are we?
Not on some height to contemplate the scene,
not in troubled waters down below,
but in between,
spectators—but also
the anxious crowd Pythagoras observed,
scrambling to get to where they do not know.
Our vantage point: a cloud of information,
data we both inhabit and consume,
doing what our kind have always done,
looking before and after, Hamlet said.
And also: crawling between earth and heaven.
Lucretius, after having called it “sweet”
to gaze at troubled waters far below,
adds “Don’t think this is schadenfreude. No;
just that we savor our tranquillity.”
We’re not the people floundering in that sea.
Ataraxia, Epicurus said:
absence of disturbance, of disorder.
Amanda Gorman calls it apathy.
In all this calm there lurks complicity.
Safe in our cloud, we listen and we look.
We calculate the numbers of the dead.
We marvel at unprecedented heat.
The storms have passed for now in this green state.
Floods have receded. Between earth and heaven
I squint up at the sky: a hazy glare.
A rainbow? Something trembles in the air.
Each hour, each minute notifications come:
storms, floods, drownings, wildfires, heat, and smoke.
Complicit in our cloud, we’re keeping track.