We have had so much rain this year that it makes me wonder whether there might not be some truth to the claim made by some that the weather is deliberately being tinkered with… Somehow this brings up to my mind a passage from a science-fiction novel I had read about in an academic book published in 2003 and which is bent on discrediting (no, casting opprobrium on) some of the conspiracies that were circulating in the USA around the time it was written; the quote is as follows:
I can see it now … frozen in an energy crisis, saddened by the Watergates of the world, dying from environmental
pollution, starving from food shortages, frightened of a global nuclear war, sick of the moral decay, afraid of the daily news, bankrupted by global monetary fluctuations, unemployed from economic depressions, crowded by the ever present birth rate, frightened by the suspicion that a global weather catastrophe was about to happen … mankind … would have been ready for ‘Alternative Three.’
Stan Deyo, The Cosmic Conspiracy, rev. ed. (Kempton, Ill.: Adventures Unlimited, 1994), quoted in Michael Barkun, A culture of conspiracy (page 59), University of California Press, Berkeley, 2003.
Rather than being stuck with this negative memory, I think that I am more likely to remember the feeling that I was enjoying a moment of quasi transcendental beauty when I was contemplating these queens of the meadows in Préalpes vaudoises as the sun was about to set on the last Saturday of May.
Believe me, to paraphrase quite freely a wise Christian theologian from the Middle Ages, Bernard of Clairvaux, there is more truth in nature than in books [aliquid amplius invenies in silvis quam in libris; ligna et lapides docebunt te quod a magistris audire non possis]…
This despite the fact that I like to plan my next set of excursions (should the weather become sunnier) with the help of books: