The Appointment in Samarra

Yesterday, while in the train to Barcelona, I was rereading Jorge Riechman's "Gente que no quiere viajar a Marte" (people that don't want to travel to Mars), a fantastic book on the subject of ecology, ethics and selflimitation. I love the way the book is edited, with many subtitles and quotes mixed with the main text. In one of those, Riechman talks about an old parable whose motto could be "you can run, but you can't hide". I've found that William S. Maughan re-told the parable in "The Appointment in Samarra":

(The speaker is Death)
There was a merchant in Bagdad who sent his servant to market to buy provisions and in a little while the servant came back, white and trembling, and said, Master, just now when I was in the marketplace I was jostled by a woman in the crowd and when I turned I saw it was Death that jostled me. She looked at me and made a threatening gesture, now, lend me your horse, and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate. I will go to Samarra and there Death will not find me. The merchant lent him his horse, and the servant mounted it, and he dug his spurs in its flanks and as fast as the horse could gallop he went. Then the merchant went down to the marketplace and he saw me standing in the crowd and he came to me and said, Why did you make a threating gesture to my servant when you saw him this morning? That was not a threatening gesture, I said, it was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Bagdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.

It's a powerful metaphor to describe our actual situation: we are desperately looking for our horse to arrive to Samarra (salvation through technology), without knowing that perhaps the "solution" it would just increase our problems in the future. What is waiting for us in Samarra could be something we didn't expect.