Monday, Jul. 11, 2005 - 9:16 p.m.
Something for my will
Lee is having a WWII obsession at the moment, but, relatedly, I'm having a WWI obsession.Hannah lent me her copy of All Quiet On The Western Front, replete with her GCSE-era scribbling in the margins ("all dead and for what?"). I'd not read it before and its graphic descriptions of constant bombardment, soldiers going mad or at least literally crapping their pants, or having their limbs blown off are perhaps not the best thing to read on your first tube journey after Thursday's bombings. And yet that was somehow easier for me than the copies of the Metro and its photos of severely wounded people that everyone else around me was reading.
But it's not just this that has been rubbing off on me from the book. It's that the narrator's main sorrowful point is that his generation of soldiers have basically had their normal life and capacity for it removed from them. And nowhere in the book does he mention the reason WHY they enlisted for the army - I mean, their teacher harangued them into it; it was not because of any idealogical beliefs on their part. At the very least, no politics or ideology is mentioned at the front line. They just do their job and they are wounded and they die.
I don't want to link it to Thursday's bombings in any other way than that I am thinking about both at the moment. This is what I'm thinking about London: on Thursday, people were just travelling to work as normal; they certainly did not want to die and they didn't sign up for any ideological symbolic death.
I was a bit pissed off, too, waking up this morning to hear that apparently London is defiantly going back to work today. Like, we still need to work for money, so we have to kind of go into work. I don't think many of us are dead happy at having to use the tube to do it, but we weren't really dead happy at having to go on the tube anyway. But for the record - I am not doing it defiantly. Just necessarily.