IMAGINE, those of you who have lost nobody in this tsunami, a world where there were no earthquakes. Imagine no hurricanes, no volcanoes, no avalanches, no floods, droughts, landslides or tidal waves.

Think of all those violent seizures of our planet’s crust and the atmosphere around it — those moments when the forces of nature turn suddenly against us human beings, wreck our lives, kill those we love, destroy our property, remove our shelter and turn our worlds upside down: those catastrophic convulsions when the best laid plans of mice and men are smashed in seconds and everything people have relied upon, planned or stored is taken from them. Then try to imagine a world without these interventions by fate.

Would you prefer it?

If you could press a button now, if you could banish from the planet all the strange, rare, tremendous shocks visited upon us by the natural world, would you? If you could expunge from human fear all those cataclysms which insurance policies are apt to call “acts of God”, would you? Would you impose upon the Universe a new order in which accidents didn’t happen?

Suppose it within your power to usher in instead an age where the seasons and the harvests were regular, the oceans calm, the Earth’s crust quiescent, the weather predictable; an age when mankind lost its former nervous respect for a planet which could smash lives without warning; would you welcome such an age? Would you banish random, man humbling catastrophes?

Well, would you? I think you hesitated.

Which is curious, isn’t it? For we do not welcome this awful week in and around the Indian Ocean; of course not. We mourn with those who have lost family and friends; of course we do. If it were our choice to trigger this seizure, our hand upon the lever of human fortune, would we have pulled the lever? Of course not.

So why the thrill?

I have hesitated before using that word “thrill”. It is easily misunderstood. It might seem to make light of the blackest few days ever experienced in the lives of millions. But all the reciting in the world of the scale of these miseries, all the acknowledgement we can make of the sympathy which they evoke, cannot hide a small, uncomfortable thought which (I am pretty confident) has occurred to you as it has occurred to me.

The thought is expressed in the word (and the punctuation) “Wow!”

A small, insistent voice in the back of my head says: “Isn’t this amazing!” A minor but insuppressible part of me has almost relished — yes, relished — those huge numbers. As the newspaper headlines spoke greedily of the numbers of dead “approaching” twenty, then fifty, then eighty, then a hundred thousand, something undeniable twitched in the back of my brain. It was a sort of excitement as the figures mounted; as though some great auctioneer of calamity were taking bids from the media floor, and I was willing the bidding to carry on upwards. When will it reach a hundred thousand? Could it reach a quarter of a million? Was this a record? How did it stand in the history of these disasters? That high! Wow!

John Lennon wrote: Imagine there's no heaven,/It's easy if you try,/ No hell below us,/ Above us only sky. And I have tried to. I never believed in heaven anyway. But do I thrill to the realisation as Lennon asks me to? No. The thought that the sky above us might fall in, or the hell below us shudder and inundate millions as it just has, enriches as it horrifies.

Imagine all the people/ Living for today . . . he continues, Nothing to kill or die for . . . Then why live, if we are not to live in a sense of our own good luck? There is something bland and flat about the world that Lennon evokes in that song, and I cannot have been alone in my 1970s generation in shuddering at such safety.

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