One thinks of Yeats, perhaps, "All changed, changed utterly", and even Byron's sentiments seem not inapposite: While stands the Colosseum, Rome shall stand; When falls the Colosseum, Rome shall fall; And when Rome falls - the World. Or maybe Voltaire's Candide is the most apt of all.
Once, or maybe twice a century, there occurs an event whose repercussions are so very, very great that it changes entirely the way humanity perceives its raison d'etre. One such occurred on All Saints' Day, 1755; another unfolded on our television screens on Tuesday - and we may yet find that the parallels are striking.
On the morning of November 1st, 1755, two violent earth tremors devastated the Portuguese city of Lisbon. Rows of houses fell like dominoes, chasms yawned in the streets, and churches collapsed upon their congregations. Some 15,000 people died immediately, and as many again succumbed to fire, disease and other hardships in the aftermath.
The earthquake had a profound effect on European thinking. The middle of the 18th century had been a very optimistic time, and there was confidence among philosophers that good presided over evil. It was felt that the science pioneered by Newton and Galileo would ultimately give humans the capability of making Earth a kind of paradise. As Voltaire put it: tout est pour le mieux dans le meilleur des mondes possibles - "All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds."
But the apparently causeless Lisbon tragedy brought home to thinking people the fact that nature still had powerful, unpredictable and seemingly malicious forces that would always be beyond control. Many interpreted the tragedy in biblical terms as a sign from God against a growth in wickedness - like John Wesley, who saw the warning aimed "not at the small and vulgar, but at the great and learned, the rich, and honourable heathens commonly called Christians". Others asked how one could now maintain at all a belief in an all-powerful and benevolent deity who could murder thousands of innocent humans at the very moment when they gathered in his church to worship him.
The event was instrumental in Voltaire's transformation into the pessimistic sceptic he became in his later years. His change of view was encapsulated in the satirical story of Candide - whom he allows to survive the cataclysm at Lisbon.
Cela est bien dit, replies the hero to a naively optimistic friend at the conclusion of the book, mais il faut cultiver notre jardin: "That is all very well, but we must cultivate our own garden." We should, in other words, be isolationist, and attend firstly to our own affairs.