Always lost.

And this brings me back to the time between eight and twelve when I read and read and in between I read all the historical plays of Shakespeare and all the other plays of Shakespeare and more and more this war of 1942–1943 makes it like that. The horrors the fears everybody’s fears the helplessness of everybody’s fears, so different from other wars makes this war like Shakespeare’s plays. Rose d’Aiguy thirteen years old had just said that now having become superstitious because of course she has now become superstitious she notices that all the signs are bad signs, just like Macbeth just like Julius Caesar, the ides of March, and the general confusion, the general fear, the general helplessness, the general nervousness is just like all the kings, they are like that and they go on like that. The war 1914–1918 was not like Shakespeare but this war is the meaninglessness of why makes all the nothingness so real and when I read Shakespeare between eight and twelve, I suppose I was drowned in all that but naturally did not believe it or did I. Certainly not later when there was more meaning and more dread. But in Shakespeare there is no meaning and no dread, there is confusion and fear, and that is what is now here.

It was when I was between twelve and seventeen that I went through the dark and dreadful days of adolescence, in which predominated the fear of death, not so much of death as of dissolution, and naturally is war like that. It is and it is not. One really can say that in war-time there is death death and death but is there dissolution. I wonder. May that not be one of the reasons among so many others why wars go on, and why particularly adolescents need it.

It was a very long time between twelve and seventeen, between Shakespeare and the Boer war which was the first war I knew to be a war, a real war where a country that was a natural country was at war.

And in between there was religion, which too had to do with adolescence and with war.

There is no love interest in these modern wars. I am speaking of the world wars but particularly of the 1939 war, there is no love interest, very little religion and no love interest. Religious people in these world wars are religious but otherwise they are like everybody in what they do and lovers the same way they may be in love but otherwise they are like everybody which was not at all as war was to me from babyhood to 1900, not at all.

From babyhood to fourteen which is the beginning of adolescence, life is mostly taken up with slowly knowing that stars are worlds, that words are ways and that force is strength and that wiles are ways as words are, in other words that one is one and that the others can come to be with that one. That is what is most occupying from babyhood to fourteen, and during that time there are things like having apples given one to take home one for you and the other four for the other four and slowly one by one they are eaten until there is none, and there is the reason for eating the last one because since the other ones are eaten then of course there is no sense in keeping the last one, because then the story has to be told and why should it since after all all your life you can have it as remorse that it has been done. War is like that, it goes on like that it keeps going on like that and soon nobody has anything to eat that is nobody who does not take what does not belong to them and later although there is remorse the very last one has been eaten if not there has to be an explanation and if there is an explanation that does not help remorse nor does it help any one, remorse does not and not eating it does not, and so as I was then so am I now, and war, was not then but the feeling was just the same and eating was just the same in so many ways. A fish bone can even be a worry anything that can happen or has happened or has not happened can be a worry and that is what war is, and so what is the difference between life and war. There is none.

So then between babyhood and fourteen there are all these things, and romantic war with them, not to believe in but to dream.

Between babyhood and fourteen there was frequent change of scene. Modern wars all wars are like that, they go places, where they never heard of in many cases, and between babyhood and fourteen there had been so many changes of scene. And different ways of traveling about, and that also is like war. Just now all the young men of France have to go, they do not know where, some of them run away and when they run away they do not know where and a great many of them are taken away they do not know where and this is all as it was between babyhood and fourteen. Europe and America and railroad and water and stage coach and walking and horse back and in every there was no astonishment and that is the way war is.

I remember being very worried in reading, if anybody in the book died and did not have children because then nobody in that family could be living yet, and if they were not living yet how could they hear what was happening. This always bothered me from that time on until just now and now well now it does seem that the future is not important any more, the world has become so shrunken and it will never be different and so it does not mean much and there is no love interest, it is mostly parents who suffer, perhaps it was like that between babyhood and fourteen.

Dear Life life is strife Claribel used to say, but she did say dear life and in any way it is and she did say life is strife but is it.

It was all that between babyhood and fourteen, and it was the nineteenth century between babyhood and fourteen and the nineteenth century dies hard all centuries do that is why the last war to kill it is so long, it is still being killed now in 1942, the nineteenth century just as the eighteenth century took from the revolution to 1840 to kill, so the nineteenth century is taking from 1914 to 1943 to kill. It is hard to kill a century almost impossible, as was the old joke about mothers-in-law, and centuries get to be like that they get to be wearing like a mother-in-law. So as I was saying from babyhood to fourteen and of course longer much longer it was the nineteenth century and the wars civil domestic and foreign were nineteenth century wars, naturally enough.

Saint George and the Dragon, Siegfried and the dragon, anybody and the dragon, the dragon is always the century any century that anybody is trying to kill, and the worst of it all is that the one that says he is trying to kill the century that has to be killed is the last piece of the century that has to be killed and often the most long-lived, such as a Napoleon a Hitler or a Julius Cæsar the century has to be killed and they are the embodiment the most persistent end of it they are to live while really in its being killed they have to go, only nobody does tell them so, nobody and so they never do know, never do know.

However when I was a baby and then on to fourteen, the nineteenth century was full on.

In the nineteenth century, there was reading, there was evolution, there was war and antiwar which was the same thing, and there was eating. Even now I always resent when in a book they say they sat down to a hearty meal and they do not tell just what it was they ate. In the nineteenth century they often did. And in these days 1943 when eating well actually it is like prohibition one is so certain that one is never going to eat again that one is not greedy but one does eat everything well in these days you would imagine that you would not take pleasure in what the characters in a novel ate when they did eat, but one does enormously, well anyway the nineteenth century, liked to cry liked to try liked to eat liked to pursue evolution and liked war, war and peace peace and war and no more.

When I was then I liked revolutions I liked to eat I liked to eat I liked to cry not in real life but in books in real life there was nothing much to cry about but in books oh dear me, it was wonderful there was so much to cry about and then there was evolution. Evolution was all over my childhood, walks abroad with an evolutionist and the world was full of evolution, biological and botanical evolution, with music as a background for emotion and books as a reality, and a great deal of fresh air as a necessity, and a great deal of eating as an excitement and as an orgy, and now well just then there was no war no actual war anywhere.

In the nineteenth century there was nothing more exciting than climbing a high hill or a mountain and seeing the rain driving across a wide plain or valley with the sun following.

There was nothing more interesting in the nineteenth century than little by little realising the detail of natural selection in insects flowers and birds and butterflies and comparing things and animals and noticing protective coloring nothing more interesting, and this made the nineteenth century what it is, the white man’s burden, the gradual domination of the globe as piece by piece it became known and became all of a piece, and the hope of Esperanto or a universal language. Now they can do the radio in so many languages that nobody any longer dreams of a single language, and there should not any longer be dreams of conquest because the globe is all one, anybody can hear everything and everybody can hear the same thing, so what is the use of conquering, and so the nineteenth century now in ’43 is slowly coming to an end.

Between babyhood and fourteen years, it is hard to know whether it takes a long time or whether it does not and if it does any part of it is interesting but very little of it is recollecting, very little and so emotion is remembered, a few dimensions, and what is seen and any day.

Some days there are coincidences and some days there are none and when there are coincidences as there are coincidences that does make superstition and at any age, there is the same astonishment and the same belief, and between babyhood and fourteen there were coincidences and astonishment. There are coincidences now yesterday and to-day and to-morrow and then for some time there are none, but any time they are astonishing when they come. It is a long time that there has been no correspondence with America and then some one offered to make one by cablegram and the next day a cablegram came, which is what makes superstition and when you are young very young superstitions are frightening and when you are old quite old superstitions are comforting.

War this war can neglect superstitions the war of 1943 because all the superstitions have been used up used up and passed away, and there is no feeling about having any new one or any old one.