When the Great War broke out, it came to me not as a superlative tragedy, but as an interruption of the most exasperating kind to my personal plans.
Only, I felt, by some such attempt to write history in terms of personal life could I rescue something that might be of value, some element of truth and hope and usefulness, from the smashing up of my own youth by the war.
At sixteen, he was inclined to be rather priggish and self-righteous. Not such bad qualities in adolescence after all, since most of us have to be self-righteous before we can be righteous.
There is still, I think, not enough recognition by teachers of the fact that the desire to think – which is fundamentally a moral problem – must be induced before the power is developed. Most people, whether men or women, wish above all else to be comfortable, and thought is a pre-eminently uncomfortable process; it brings to the individual far more suffering than happiness in a semi-civilised world which still.
You know you wouldn’t be happy unless you married an odd sort of person.
The fact that, within ten years, I lost one world, and after a time rose again, as it were, from spiritual death to find another, seems to me one of the strongest arguments against suicide that life can provide. There may not be – I believe that there is not – resurrection after death, but nothing could prove more conclusively than my own brief but eventful history the fact that resurrection is possible within our limited span of earthly time.
For me, as for all the world, the War was a tragedy and a vast stupidity, a waste of youth and of time; it betrayed my faith, mocked my love, and irremediably spoilt my career.
I joined the Pass Mods. class and studied the cyropaedia and Livy’s Wars with a resentful feeling that there was quite enough war in the world without having to read about it in Latin.
At this time of the year it seems that everything ought to be creative, not destructive, and that we should encourage things to live and not die.
English lecturers... who treat the Americans as a race of barbarians without any history should be taken for a tour round Washington before they are permitted to speak!
Love, for her, was something to be gloried in and acknowledged; like so many others, she had not seen enough of the War at first hand to realise how quickly romance was being replaced by bitterness and pessimism in all the young lovers whom 1914 had caught at the end of their teens.
To have some real work to do after more than a year of purposeless pottering was like a bracing visit to a cliff-bound coast after lethargic existence on a marshy lowland.
People talked so foolishly, I thought, about the ennobling effects of suffering. No doubt the philosophy that tells you your soul grows through grief and sorrow is right – ultimately. But I don’t think this is the case at first. At first, pain beyond a certain point merely makes you lifeless, and apathetic to everything but itself.
And as I went up to him and took his hands, I felt that I had made no mistakes; and although I knew that, in a sense which could never be true of him, I was linked with the past that I had yielded up, inextricably and for ever, I found it not inappropriate that the years of frustration and grief and loss, of work and conflict and painful resurrection, should have led me through their dark and devious ways to this new beginning.
I had seen the poor, the meek and the modest, the young, the brave and the idealistic – all those, in fact, who always are too easily enchanted by high-sounding phrases – giving their lives and their futures in order that the powerful might have more power, the rich grow richer, the old remain in comparative security.
I look wildly for facts and I can only find arguments.
That’s the worst of sorrow,” I decided, with less surprise than I had accepted the same conclusion after Roland’s death. “It’s always a vicious circle. It makes one tense and hard and disagreeable, and this means that one repels and antagonises people, and then they dislike and avoid one – and that means more isolation and still more sorrow.
Probably, in the unfamiliar situation, responsibility was never formally allocated to anyone by anybody, and, human nature being incurably optimistic and fundamentally hostile to assuming any work not established as its own by long tradition, each person who might have shouldered the task of organization hopefully supposed it to have been performed by one of the other.
You see, when everything else is gone, there’s always work. I don’t think anyone ever realises how much work can mean until the other things are gone.
But we share a memory which is worth all the rest of the world, and the sun of that memory never sets. And you know that I love you, that I would do anything in the world in my power if you should ask it, and that I am your servant as well as your brother. ‘EDWARD.
Daphne tried to convey to him that the likelihood of degrees for women at Oxford was a matter for satisfaction, perhaps, but hardly for excitement or ratification. Women’s accomplishments in the University had long been equal, if not superior, to men’s; degrees were not a privilege, they were simply what women deserved – their due, their right. She became very animated as she argued on this topic.