In 15 Seconds, We Are Humbled : Earthquake: We bury our fear of death under towers of accomplishment. Maybe a simpler life would be more supportive of human frailty.

I live high up on Potrero Hill. From my bedroom window I have a panoramic view of downtown San Francisco, the Berkeley Hills, Oakland and the Bay Bridge. Last night, I kept getting up every hour or two to look at the downtown skyline--utterly dark except for the battery-powered emergency lights--and on toward the carless bridge and the stretch of the Nimitz Freeway where a hundred, two hundred, who knows how many more people are still sitting in their automobiles, crushed to death.

Instantaneous, pointless death is such a deep and atavistic fear that we bury it or joke about it until it walks in the door and flashes its death-mask grin. When a plane crashes and a couple of hundred people, who a few seconds earlier were chattering and drinking happily, become bits of incinerated flesh, we are rudely awakened for a few hours, a day or two, because we know they could have been us, and then we doze back into the somnolence of denial. Flying is still safer than driving, we say. It’s probably safer than walking. Anyway, what can you do?

What can you do. . . . The Ohlone Indians, who lived around San Francisco Bay for thousands of years, must have experienced earthquakes far more powerful than the World Series quake, or whatever it’s going to be called. But to people living at that level of simplicity, earthquakes are just a terrifying curiosity. Their society is not utterly incapacitated by collapsing overpass pylons and falling bridge decks. They do not risk months without water when aqueducts break, or neighborhood conflagrations when water pressure disappears.

“Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” Obviously, we have learned nothing since Shelley introduced us to Ozymandias. As a species, we can’t resist flaunting our profound ability to defy nature with our dams, skyscrapers, freeways, nuclear power plants. And the more spectacular this ability becomes, the more vulnerable we make ourselves.

That is the oldest cliche in the world--the higher you rise, the farther you fall--but it seems we keep having to relearn it, and we never really learn from it.

Suppose we had never built the Bay Bridge. We would go to work by ferry, or by driving around the bay rather than across it. That would be inconvenient, time-consuming, inefficient, all of those things a frenetic and gilt-edged society abhors. But the Bay Area would not be in a state of near-total paralysis today. We wouldn’t be looking at billions and billions of dollars in lost productivity and months or years of chaos and worse gridlock than before, as bridges and elevated highways are repaired or torn down and rebuilt. I wouldn’t be spending the night staring at unseen corpses out in the red-flashing dark.

It’s remarkable how intact our paralyzed city seems; it’s unthinkable what kind of horror that 1906 earthquake, 30 times stronger than yesterday’s, would have caused.

Think hard about this, Los Angeles. Remember, you were supposed to have been hit before us. How many more people are you going to squeeze into your deadly little arid basin? What are you going to do when your aqueducts are destroyed? When your freeways come tumbling down? When the mobility you have so assiduously pursued bites you back, paralyzing you?

Freeways, bridges, tunnels, aqueducts, dams and all the rest--for this whole century we have been fascinated by such gargantuan wizardry, partly because it snubs nature (or what we used to call reality) so wondrously; but mainly, and quite simply, because we could build it. The atomic bomb, Robert Oppenheimer said, was “technically sweet”; it had to be built. Inventing computers was the same sort of brilliant feat, but a bizarre little “virus” hardly anyone understands seems capable of shutting down the nation’s information network.

This isn’t to say we should dance our way back to the Bronze Age. But it is to wonder how many more layers of engineered and technocratic complexity we should add to this vulnerable invention we call modern society.

From my window now I can see little ferries racing back and forth across the bay, rescued from ignominy (basically, we’d left them to the tourists) so they can help rescue us from this catastrophe. How do you tell a society like ours that wisdom lies in reaching backward for old ideas?