Strange Comfort

I've been wanting to take a bird's eye view of my, and our, life and times, here at this juncture when the UN's science panel has just provided us with a sharp warning about impending climate breakdown. [Guardian article]

I've been singing "I've got that sci-fi feeling" to the tune of "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin' "*
––that sci-fi feeling I get when I see our world at a remove, as if we were in an unfolding novel––a sci-fi one, which we sort of are. 
One we are both characters in and creators of...

And I've been thinking of St. Augustine––how he lived (354–430) in northern Africa (present-day Algeria) during the decline of Roman Empire, including the Sack of Rome in 410––I'd thought of that on 9/11 too.
 
Oooh---look---artist William Kentridge's huge, long mural about the history of Rome "Triumphs and Laments" was made with “reverse graffiti”: power washing away the pollution on the walls along the Tiber River.

Here, from a cool article about creating the mural ––recreating figures from Mantegna's "Triumphs of Caesar":

Human-made calamities are not new and unique to us, of course.
As Augustine wrote in The City of God:

"In various times and places before . . . , the human race was crushed with numberless and sometimes incredible calamities."

He's refuting the accusation that Rome had become weak because it had become Christian--pointing out that it––we––suffered plenty before. 

I don't know that that's comforting, exactly, but it does put things in perspective--like the little boy in My Life As a Dog reciting terrible events to himself to contrast with his falling-apart life.
I suppose that's a kind of comfort---or strengthening medicine.

Oh! To strengthen is the original meaning of "comfort"!
I had never thought of its etymology: from late Latin confortare ‘strengthen,’ from com- (expressing intensive force) + Latin fortis ‘strong.’

This is NOT to say, "well, we survived this sort of thing before", which is ridiculous: many of us didn't survive catastrophes (an estimated 60 percent of Europeans didn't survive the Black Death)––though again, Augustine offers a weird comfort: 
that no one died who wasn't going to die anyway.

Well, OK, then. 
If you died at a young age in 410 or 1347, or if you lived to your natural life span, either way, by now you'd still have been dead for a long, long time. 

And on that weird note, I'm off to Sunday coffee with bink!
____________________

*"now you're gone, gone, gone..."

The Righteous Brothers are white?
I always pictured them looking like Barry White, not... egrets.
But no, they are the original "blue-eyed soul".

"You've lost that loving feeling..."