One-minute review: The First World War is over. The world breathes a sigh of relief. But Santayana warns that “they are hardly out of the fog of war when they are lost in the fog of peace.” Living is a continuing state of war. Life demands victory. If not on the battlefield, then in the war of love. “Only the dead are safe; only the dead have seen the end of war.”
Ideas:
“…the very sunlight and brisk autumnal air seemed to have heard the tidings, and to invite the world to begin to live again at ease. Certainly many a sad figure and many a broken soul must slink henceforth on crutches, a mere survival; but they, too, will die off gradually. The grass soon grows over a grave.”
“Their soldiering is over; they remember, with a strange, proud grief, their comrades who died to make this day possible, hardly believing that it would ever come. They are overjoyed, yet half ashamed, to be safe themselves; they forget their wounds; they see a green vista before them, a jolly, busy, sporting, loving life in the old familiar places. Everything will go on, they fancy, as if nothing had happened.”
“God—I mean the sum of all possible good—is immutable; to make our peace with him, it is we, not he, that must change.”
“It is the stupid obstinacy of our self-love that produces tragedy, and makes us angry with the world.”
“War is but resisted change; and change must needs be resisted so long as the organism it would destroy retains any vitality.”
“Certainly war is hell, as you, my fair friends, are fond of repeating; but so is rebellion against war. To live well, you must be victorious. It is with war as with the passion of love, which is a war of another kind.”
Great Essays. Ed. Houston Peterson.
What is an essay? “They are all prefaces. A preface is nothing but a talk with the reader; and they [essays] do nothing else.” Charles Lamb.
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