When the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind after Job complained of his suffering, He asked Job "Hast thou entered into the
springs of the sea? or hast thou walked in the search of the depth?
38:17 Have the gates of death
been opened unto thee? or hast thou seen the doors of the shadow of death?
38:18 Hast thou perceived the
breadth of the earth? declare if thou knowest it all." Job 38:17-18. Like Auden's Old Masters, the ancient Hebrews understood suffering. They were keenly aware of how tenuous man's hold on life is. And they were keenly aware that there was no clear or comprehensible explanation for suffering: God says to Job, in effect, you cannot understand.
In one word, the Arabs express the inexorability of fate. "Maktib": it is written. God has foreordained the moment and the manner of every person's death, and there is no escaping. (A famous scene in Lawrence of Arabia elaborates on this notion. Lawrence saves a man from the desert; only to have to execute the same man for murder in order to keep peace among the tribes.)
There is a moment in Flannery O'Connor's short story The Displaced Person when the main character's spine "pops" as he is run over by tractor. Death always seems particularly horrible when it is violent. That is why, for me at least, the idea of being trapped on a burning skyscraper with a choice of incineration or joining hands and leaping to my death is so intolerable to contemplate.
And I feel the same horror at the thought of watching a wall of water as high as a small building and as long as the horizon devour the land before me until I and thousands more are smothered and crushed. It is not to be borne. And yet for thousands in Japan there was no escape. They were as blameless as Job, unsuspecting of their fate, only to suffer a swift, violent death that caught them completely unprepared. Our civilization, our technology, our modernity, our sophistication were helpless before the brute force of nature, and neither the consolation of religion nor the insight of poetry is really adequate to address nature's random cruelty.
All we can really do is suppress a guilty shudder of relief that we were not in the path of the wave, and try to help the survivors pick up the pieces.