On foreseeing trouble

Seneca wrote this letter to console his friend Liberalis, who was shaken by news that the colony of Lyons had burned to the ground in a single night. Seneca's point is not that Liberalis should have expected that particular fire, but that a wise man keeps the whole range of possible misfortune in view, so that no disaster arrives as pure ambush. The blow that stuns us, he argues, is the one we had ruled out in advance. What has been rehearsed in the mind arrives already half-disarmed.

This week China's National Cultural Heritage Administration ordered public museums nationwide to strengthen emergency management after a series of failures, including a sudden power outage at the Terracotta Warriors Museum in Xi'an, where visitors used flashlights to keep viewing the exhibits during a blackout that lasted several hours. The institutions were faulted, in effect, for having imagined that the ordinary summer would hold. Seneca's counsel is the same one a good curator or a careful parent already knows: the point of picturing the fire is not gloom. It is that when the lights go out, your hands already know where the door is.