On Mumbai?

Everyone and their dog has understandably been concerned this week with recent events in Mumbai, its origins, perpetrators and ramifications. I don’t know if Kazys Varnelis had this in mind when he posted this passage from that most broad-minded and empathetic of historians, Fernand Braudel, but it certainly resonated with me:

Events are the ephemera of history; they pass across its stage like fireflies, hardly glimpsed before they settle back into darkness and as often as not into oblivion. Every event, however brief, has to be sure a contribution to make, lights up some dark corner or even some wide vista of history. Nor it it only political history which benefits most, for every historical landscape – political, economic, social, even geographical – is illumined by the intermittent flare of the event.

Fernand Braudel (1973), The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, New York: Harper Collins, Vol. 2, p.901.