As Hurricane Milton barrelled toward Florida last month, I taught a three-hour Zoom class and tried not to refresh my phone for updates. I grew up in Florida, and my parents, along with my sister and her family, still live on the Atlantic Coast, a hundred and fifty miles from where Milton hit. All day, I’d responded to worried friends, telling them my family was fine, not their side of the state.
But the mass of the storm was so big. Some friends who’d moved from Florida to Asheville, North Carolina, were still without power after the devastation of Helene. On my class’s break, I saw an alert saying that a tornado had touched down in the county next to the one where my parents live.
I texted. My mom said that it was loud outside, but they were safe. Their house is concrete, built to sustain most hurricanes, but the winds inside a tornado can get up to three hundred miles per hour.
If a powerful one had touched down close enough to their house, they could have lost their roof. Class ended and I signed off. I refreshed weather updates, watched storm-surge videos.
On impulse, I picked up my old college copy of “King Lear” and looked through it for the scene of Lear raving at the storm. “King Lear” is about lots of things—power, family, helplessness. It is also about language, both the slippery tricks of lies and the sometime solace of truth.
It opens with a string of falsehoods that wreak havoc on nearly everyone. The only people who tell the truth are either dis.