One of these things is not like the other one

[Michael Bailey]

the list of disasters quoted in Chapter 10, as Laura mentions,
includes both strictly natural disasters and those in which human
activities lead to the same thing.  It goes back to the Eros/Thanatos
distinction set up in Profane's thinking behind the library.  A
tendency toward the inanimate is - at least for the purposes of the
extended metaphors set forth in V. - a tendency toward death.  Life is
a different ball of wax, and the distinction, maybe is caring: as
Pynchon wrote, the cruel world of inanimate objects doesn't care; can
keep the disasters coming.





-- 
"Such regulations may, no doubt, be considered as in some respects a
violation of natural liberty. But those exertions of the natural
liberty of a few individuals, which might endanger the security of the
whole society, are, and ought to be, restrained by the laws of all
governments, of the most free as well as of the most despotical." -
Adam Smith