strange radiation: the pool of radiance archive
Adventures with an unreliable narrator.
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Nov 11 03: Elevenses
Armistice Day is here and already approaching its end. There was a parade here in the city, which I didn’t see. For my part, my most profound grasp of WWI came from reading Mark Helprin’s achingly beautiful A Soldier of the Great War, which if you haven’t read then by all means you should. The life of a single man, and an examination of the deformities imposed upon our world by that first great spasm of continent-spanning violence that in the end was not the War to End All Wars we hoped it would be.
We remember, and we learn; but we remember too dimly, and we learn too slowly. You who have paid the price, forgive us; and then from your beds of cold wisdom, from your graves marked or un-, tucked away singly or in heaps, smack some sense into our feeble heads.
(Links aplenty to timely sources of beauty and horror, and the usual insight by many more wise and eloquent than myself, to be found at Making Light.)