The thunderbolts we never saw coming

When the world's chaos leaves us beyond words, it's a natural impulse to search for them elsewhere; in this case, to seek them in how great thinkers and artists have described chaos itself. "There are places for chaos on the page," wrote poet Stanley Moss. "Chaos is endless longing." Bob Dylan once wrote, "I accept chaos. I'm not sure whether it accepts me." Mary Shelley espoused in her 1831 preface to "Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus" that "invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos..."