Earthquake in Italy

The earthquake that devastated L'Aquila is very far away from where I am, and yet it is not. Not far from L'Aquilia (80 kilometers) in the Abruzzi region of Italy is Manoppello, where my mother was born, and her parents met and lived until coming to the U.S., and where I still have relatives, although I don't know any of them. I know that some of them still live in the house where my grandmother lived. Since early news reports said that other towns and villages were affected by the quake, I tried to find information on Manoppello. I found only one article, in Italian. I'm told I was bilingual for awhile--when I knew few words in English or Italian--but I can't really understand, or certainly read Italian. Yet after staring at the article for awhile, I did begin to understand enough: though the earthquake was felt there, there were no deaths and no significant damage. That of course is not true of L'Aquila, where hundreds have died and many buildings devastated.

That I would feel connected to this distant disaster in a place where I know no one is not entirely goofy. I saw another article somewhere about efforts in the U.S. to collect money for earthquake relief by Italian Americans--someone said that it doesn't matter how weak the ties now, how distant the American life is from the Italian or the immigrant experience, the bond is still there. These connections occur in time as well as place; from another time to this.

That I live in a very earthquake-prone area now that (like L'Aquila until this week) hasn't experienced a quake in long enough time to forget the danger in daily life, has something to do with the attention I'm paying. The experience of such a disaster lasts well beyond it in time, as evidenced in an oped piece in the New York Times by Stanislao Pugliese, about a far worse quake in another Abruzzi town in 1915, in which "3,500 of the town’s 5,000 residents had perished in a matter of 30 seconds." Among the dead was the mother of Italian novelist Ignazio Silone. This immense event changed him and all his fictions, Pugliese writes, which"bear the often subtle, sometimes vivid imprint of the catastrophe."

Such a disaster changes or reinforces ideas about fate. "In a twist of fate that surprised no one, the only house left undamaged was uninhabited." In the disaster and the aftermath, much is also revealed about human beings and their institutions:

“In an earthquake,” Silone wrote decades after his experience, “everyone dies: rich and poor, learned and illiterate, authorities and the people. An earthquake accomplishes what words and laws promise and never achieve: the equality of all. But it is an ephemeral equality, for when fear had died down, collective misfortune became the opportunity for even greater injustices.”

“Only loss is universal,” he once wrote, “and true cosmopolitanism in this world must be based on suffering.”

Many of our lives are not hit so hard, though at any moment they may be. But we who have been relatively fortunate are not absolved from empathy. It is our role to understand and to act.