December 11th, 2011

It's been a few days since my last post.  I often wonder if it matters if I don't post something or if I skip a few days, with so few followers, I wonder if a book of the day even matters when there is so much in cyberspace to occupy a person, but I enjoy the blog, it gives me something to do.  

Purchased in London, England 2011

There are days I wish we spent more time in England, maybe two weeks...maybe enough to spend an entire month, or just move there and live in a small flat, I could find a temp job somewhere...it's a dream.  I loved not only the buildings and the people and the history I was so familiar with that upon finding a place I read about I instantly felt akin to it.... but it was the smaller things... the tiny places to eat, the little shops with old books and fresh cheese, it was the variety, the mix of people, the everything.  

My fascination with the British extends to the wars they fought in and the Great War has always held with me a level  of reverence and interest.  I love not only reading about the little intricacies of battle or who caused what, ect... but I have a fascination with what that war in particular did to a people, a civilization that seemed burnt and soiled after the war.  

Poets especially, placed into words, the horror and disillusionment of that war.  I read their words and I wonder why on earth anyone would find it good to fight, to kill, to destroy... for whatever reason.  

Rupert Brooke is one of my favorite voices of the war, even though he died soon after it began, in 1915 of septicaemia.  If you have the priviledge of reading his pre-war words in comparison to the words he wrote during the war, its a vital look at what I think a war like that did to an entire generation of boys going off to be the heroes in a war that would only last until Christmas, as they always are.

Blow bugles, blow! They brought us, for our death,

Holiness, lacked so long, and love, and pain.

Honour has come back, as a king, to earth,

And pain his subjects  with a royal wage;

And Nobleness walks in our ways again;

And we have come into our heritage.

-The Dead 1915    p 21