Irene's winds meet Hemingway's wisdom

BY STEVE JANOSKI

'Il faut (d’abord) durer.’

Supposedly it was Ernest Hemingway’s favorite saying, and, roughly translated from French, it means "One must (first) endure."

I would be lying if I said this wasn’t a phrase I had liberated for my own use after reading it some years ago, because if my limited experiences have taught me nothing else, it’s that often there comes a time when one must simply put their head down and move forward — as Churchill said, "If you’re going through hell, keep going."

As I write this on Friday afternoon, Hurricane Irene is bearing down on the North Carolina coast, and over the past week, the warnings for this area have vacillated from somewhere between "There’s going to be a lot of rain" to "Repent, for the end is nigh."

It’s yet unknown how hideous the storm will be when it strikes New Jersey, and its strength and the magnitude of the damage it causes may make these words seem entirely foolish by Wednesday, or at least defang them if the city streets remain dry due to a tragedy narrowly averted.

But one lesson that we can take from this storm, or even the threat of this storm, is the same one that we must carry away from all natural disasters: nothing, absolutely nothing, is guaranteed, and things in life can and will change in monumental ways without hesitation.

We all hear, of course, that there is a "reason" for every misfortune, but I’ve never thought that to be true.

I am no fatalist and a particularly weak believer in God, and I cast about between being some sort of bastardized deist to an agnostic depending what time of day you ask, so the idea that there is a "reason for everything" seems a naïve, foolish way to justify the curveballs (and sometimes the artillery shells) that life hurls at us.

Whether an event happened for a reason is simply irrelevant, and putting it in cosmic terms, such as suggesting that a space god deemed it necessary that this thing happen for such and such a purpose, is a waste of time.

What is no waste of time — what is completely necessary, in fact — is to simply determine to continue.

It goes without saying that this weekend will be hard on somebody, regardless if that somebody is in North Carolina, Maryland, or New Jersey, and that even if we don’t have to bear Irene’s hammering might, we will inevitably have to do so again when some disaster, be it public or private, befalls us.

If it does happen to be this weekend, though, it will be a frigid reminder that no matter how comfortable we get, how safe and secure in our happy little lives are, we are but a few powerless days away from being thrown into an unimaginable upheaval that would have been totally foreign to us but a week before.

Hopefully, we will take away lessons from this, because aside from proving the strength of our spines, learning is the only thing that these calamities are useful for.

Maybe we will learn to not build in flood basins and go toe-to-toe with nature, and dismiss the silly ideas of building 10-foot wide flood tunnels to Nutley as exactly what they are: silly ideas.

Maybe we will learn to live with and around the land a little bit better, because we know that when Nature rises up in her full fervor we can be swept from the table like so many plastic pawns.

This is my own conjecture, of course, and it’s more than likely that things will never change because of property tax rolls and political battles.

But for the regular people, the ones in Pequannock and Pompton Lakes and Lincoln Park, who will go through this storm and be worse off for it, there is nothing left to do but keep going.

Endure, once again.

E-mail: janoski@northjersey.com

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