Writing in the aftermath of the earthquake that struck Haiti on January 12, 2010, Yanick Lahens contemplates life on fault lines. In the passage cited above, from Failles, the book published later that same year, Lahens comes to terms with the collision of human and geological time and space, and the apparently sudden awareness brought by the earthquake: the Earth moves beneath us. And yet, if the great majority of Haitians were unaware, some knew, Lahens admits. The “distant metabolism” of the planet is too slow to appear on human radar, Lahens implies, thus making it easy to forget. In this short chapter, entitled “Continents à la dérive,” Lahens makes a key argument about the consequences of passivity and ignorance. The earthquake exposed a crosshatching of social, economic, and political fault lines. Like shifting tectonic plates, these networked forces are largely invisible, yet their visible effects, she contends, are equally as devastating. The failure to see these rifts is owed, in large part, to the different speeds with which they move. “Si la lenteur des phénomènes souterrains nous a forcé à l’oubli,” she writes, “c’est paradoxalement la vitesse de ceux qui se déroulent en surface qui nous contraint à l’esquive et nous conduit donc au même déni” (Failles, 33). This paradox moves between oubli, or the passive forgetting of geological fault lines, and déni, the willful denial of political fissures. If the earthquake was caused by slow-moving plates that destroyed the natural and built environment, spectacularly, in seconds, political decisions, enacted relatively quickly, have consequences with a long afterlife. In either case, she suggests, the refusal to face up to reality ends in disaster.