Oracular words from 1937

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

In the spirit of “everything old is new again” here is a passage I ran into in a book* published in 1937.

[QUOTE=Michael Innes]
All over the world today are we not facing a rising tide of ideological intolerance, and are not violence and terrorism more and more in men’s thoughts? And … is this not something to haunt … naturally unstable men, whatever their particular belief may be? The modern world is full of unwholesome armies of martyrs and inquisitors. We bind ourselves together by the million and sixty million to hate and kill - kill, as we persuade ourselves, for an idea. Are we to be surprised if here and there an individual kills simply because he hates?
[/QUOTE]

Not that this is startlingly new or original, but I was startled to come across it from a source nearly 80 years old. Sobering thought as we face the Orlando shooting, the anniversary of the Charleston shooting, and all the rest of the mess going on in recent years.

I hope that our next few years do not face us with horrors as comprehensive and world-changing as those that faced those people at that time.

*Hamlet Revenge

2

My favorite poem was written in 1919 about the aftermath of the First World War. I couldn’t get it out of my head after September 11, 2001, and it continues to haunt me through the tragedies of the 21st century. I looked it up most recently to read and reflect after the Orlando shooting. The 20th century really made horrors of this scale possible, along with the means to instantly communicate them.

The Second Coming
by W.B. Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

3

In Henry V, the Duke of Burgundy speaks to the kings of France and England, entreating them to make a peace in the war between the two conuntries. It’s as relevant now as it was then. Basically, everything’s going to pot because war doesn’t give people time todo anything but kill and maim.

My duty to you both, on equal love,
Great Kings of France and England! That I have labour’d,
With all my wits, my pains and strong endeavours,
To bring your most imperial majesties
Unto this bar and royal interview,
Your mightiness on both parts best can witness.
Since then my office hath so far prevail’d
That, face to face and royal eye to eye,
You have congreeted, let it not disgrace me,
If I demand, before this royal view,
What rub or what impediment there is,
Why that the naked, poor and mangled Peace,
Dear nurse of arts and joyful births,
Should not in this best garden of the world
Our fertile France, put up her lovely visage?
Alas, she hath from France too long been chased,
And all her husbandry doth lie on heaps,
Corrupting in its own fertility.
Her vine, the merry cheerer of the heart,
Unpruned dies; her hedges even-pleach’d,
Like prisoners wildly overgrown with hair,
Put forth disorder’d twigs; her fallow leas
The darnel, hemlock and rank fumitory
Doth root upon, while that the coulter rusts
That should deracinate such savagery;
The even mead, that erst brought sweetly forth
The freckled cowslip, burnet and green clover,
Wanting the scythe, all uncorrected, rank,
Conceives by idleness and nothing teems
But hateful docks, rough thistles, kecksies, burs,
Losing both beauty and utility.
And as our vineyards, fallows, meads and hedges,
Defective in their natures, grow to wildness,
Even so our houses and ourselves and children
Have lost, or do not learn for want of time,
The sciences that should become our country;
But grow like savages,–as soldiers will
That nothing do but meditate on blood,–
To swearing and stern looks, diffused attire
And every thing that seems unnatural.
Which to reduce into our former favour
You are assembled: and my speech entreats
That I may know the let, why gentle Peace
Should not expel these inconveniences
And bless us with her former qualities.

4

At least, these days there aren’t bigots posing as social scientists advocating eugenics and forced sterilizations of “undesirables”, all while enjoying public respect as experts. This was very much the case in 1937.

One good thing Nazism did was reveal the true horror of where eugenics would lead.

5

This is not history repeating itself. It is history as a continuum, with people pretty much the same in one century as in another. It ebbs and flows in its conspicuous intensity, according to what else is going on in the world to distract people from the universal constants of human nature…