It is September, 1666. In the year that ends in the Number of the Beast, gunpowder and the Duke of York stalk burning London.

The fire that began in Pudding Lane has burned for three days. Its orange fingers have torn apart the packed tenements of the poor, sending refugees streaming through narrow alleys. It has leaped to the shopping district of Cheapside, showing no respect for the goods heaped up for the perusal of bewigged Cavaliers.

At St. Paul's Cathedral, the flames leap like monkeys into the scaffolding erected to aid Christopher Wren's renovations. The lead roof melts and floods the crypts, where books and treasures stored for safety are destroyed.

James, Duke of York, future king and exile, is put in charge of fighting the fire. He wields the only weapon that can stop the conflagration: black powder. Buildings in the path of the fire are blasted to splinters to create massive firebreaks.

Diarist Samuel Pepys will climb a church steeple on the last day of the fire, to watch it burn itself out, starved of fuel.

In the aftermath, the glee is barely contained. Not from the hordes of the poor who are camping in parks, or being dispersed to prevent riot and rebellion. No, the glee comes from Christopher Wren, Robert Hooke, and dozens of others who deluge King Charles II with their plans to rebuild.

Nothing is as desirable as a disaster. The Great Fire left two thirds of the City of London a tabula rasa, a slate scraped clean, on which they could build anew. If all those buildings and people had still been in place, there would be no chance for greatness.

It's been said that the impulse to destroy is also a creative impulse, and that's at least partly true. Disasters are a chance for a fresh start. Most recently, it's been put into words by Rahm Emanuel, one of Barack Obama's chief political operatives.

"You never let a serious crisis go to waste," Emanuel said. "And what I mean by that it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before."

That bleak impulse underlies everything from economic stimulus ("Now we can finally build that bridge and fill all those potholes!") to those whose politics put them at the fringe of public opinion. ("This will be capitalism's final crisis, they'll see!")

Beyond practical and ideological reasons, something inside our clever ape brains just likes seeing the world go smash.

In a world of six billion people, ruled by a thin crust of wealthy and powerful, the average human is largely powerless to change things. There are no blank spaces on the maps, either on the far side of the world or on the next block of houses. Making your way is a constant process of negotiating with what has gone before.

Until a hurricane drifts across the warm waters of the Gulf and hits Category Five. Until the big one shakes Tokyo to its foundations. Until the Dow finally succumbs to panic and the rot of bad loans and plunges down below 5,000. Until the asteroid falls.

Then, with that great blank canvas, we can build something, even if we know it would be hard and ugly. We can pretend that building is less fraught than getting along, can indulge our fantasies of being rugged individualists, born too late for the frontier. We imagine Mad Max had more fun than logic suggests.

So we track that hurricane on CNN, we stock our earthquake kits, we root against the Dow. We hope for fire. And we wait.

We wait, in the false hope that we're the next Christopher Wren, born to raise golden domes above a ravaged wasteland.

Visit Matthew Claxton's blog, Evolving Langley, at http://tiny.cc/A0D3W at www.langleyadvance.com