That Is The Trouble With

I Was Astonished To Find That The Positions My Grandfather Had Defended Were Now Overgrown And Entangled With Trees And Thorns. I Suppose I Had Developed A Sense Of Reverence For The Locations He Described In His Memoirs And Letters - The Forts And The High Emplacements. I Had Expected Them To Have Been Preserved In Some Way.

I Do Think It Is Harder To Acknowledge Our Strengths, Or To Forgive Ourselves And Each Other For Our Shortcomings, When There Has Not Been A Result We Can All Agree On. And It Is Certainly Impossible To Imagine Forgiving The Enemy While Their Animus Remains Undefeated. Yet War Doesn't End With Armistice, It Only Ends With Forgiveness And Reconciliation.

I Think The Recent Cluster Of Wwii Novels Is So Good Because We Have Reached An Optimal Distance From The War. Just As A Lens Has Its Focal Length, The Novel Also Has Its Best Distance From The Action.

I Think That There's Something Extremely Beautiful About The Olympic Ideal And Its Motto - 'swifter, Higher, Stronger' - It's Such A Beautiful Motto, And It Celebrates Everything Which Is The Antithesis Of Death And Dissolution And Entropy.

To Be Well In Your Mind You Have First To Be Free.