Wars I Have Seen Read Free Page A

and you had to find out that stars were worlds and moved around and that there were comets and that there was wind and rain, grass and flowers and birds and butterflies were less exciting in California, but most of all there were books and food, food and books, both excellent things. And then also and this is strange if you like but I was then already sceptical about Utopias, naturally so, I liked habits but I did not like that habits should be known as mine. Habits like dogs dogs have habits but they do not like to be told about their habits, and the only way to have a Utopia is not only to have habits but to be liked to be told about these habits, and this I did not like. I can remember very well not liking to be told that I had habits.
    To come back to Shakespeare, Shakespeare which I read so much mostly the plays about wars, English kings and wars often said that nothing was anything that human beings had no meaning, that not anything had any meaning and everything was just like that. And it did worry me even when I was seven and eight not really worried me but it was there and then well not then but all the years I was grown up it was not like that and now when here in France when we all thought the young men were safe they are now all being taken away well it is like that, Shakespeare was right it is all just like that, even superstitions are all just like that, they mostly, said the very tall thirteen-year-old girl, they are always bad luck and then we all hope again, just like that, and although Shakespeare is right, we all do hope again.
    Once upon a time the moon shone.
    The visitors came.
    The piano was struck that is the keys.
    The ages although only differing between themselves and fifteen made them polite and complimentary, and no one is careless and if they are there is a loss.
    War is never fatal but always lost. Always lost. And as they all said this, they knew that they meant what they said. Always lost.
    And this brings me back to the time between eight and twelve when I read and read and in between I read all the historical plays of Shakespeare and all the other plays of Shakespeare and more and more this war of 1942–1943 makes it like that. The horrors the fears everybody’s fears the helplessness of everybody’s fears, so different from other wars makes this war like Shakespeare’s plays. Rose d’Aiguy thirteen years old had just said that now having become superstitious because of course she has now become superstitious she notices that all the signs are bad signs, just like Macbeth just like Julius Caesar, the ides of March, and the general confusion, the general fear, the general helplessness, the general nervousness is just like all the kings, they are like that and they go on like that. The war 1914–1918 was not like Shakespeare but this war is the meaninglessness of why makes all the nothingness so real and whenI read Shakespeare between eight and twelve, I suppose I was drowned in all that but naturally did not believe it or did I. Certainly not later when there was more meaning and more dread. But in Shakespeare there is no meaning and no dread, there is confusion and fear, and that is what is now here.
    It was when I was between twelve and seventeen that I went through the dark and dreadful days of adolescence, in which predominated the fear of death, not so much of death as of dissolution, and naturally is war like that. It is and it is not. One really can say that in war-time there is death death and death but is there dissolution. I wonder. May that not be one of the reasons among so many others why wars go on, and why particularly adolescents need it.
    It was a very long time between twelve and seventeen, between Shakespeare and the Boer war which was the first war I knew to be a war, a real war where a country that was a natural country was at war.
    And in between there was religion, which too had to do with adolescence and with war.
    There is no love interest in these modern wars. I