Drawn by desire of Lord Suffolk, by his student Lieutenant Kirpal Singh, 10 May 1941This, I don't think, has much to do with Ondaatje's book but it came to my mind when reading The English Patient. There is a tendency in the US to paint our history with a golden brush. I am thinking specifically of the World Wars. For some reason, perhaps because my knowledge of this time in our history comes from Hollywood, World War II has never seemed as evil, as vile, as terrifying, or as scream-inducing as the (non) wars since the 50s.
I am a man who did not enjoy poetry until I heard a woman recite it to us.
Meanwhile with the help of an anecdote, I fell in love.
Words, Caravaggio. They have power.
Half my days I cannot bear not to touch you.
The rest of the time I feel it doesn't matter
if I ever see you again. It isn't the morality,
it is how much you can bear.
He has been disassembled by her.
And if she has brought him to this, what has he brought her to?
Hana is quiet. he knows the depth of darkness in her, her lack of a child and of faith. He is always coaxing her from the edge of her fields of sadness. A child lost. A father lost.
"I have lost someone like a father as well," he has said. But she knows this man beside her is one of the charmed, who has grown up an outsider and so can switch allegiances, can replace loss. There are those destroyed by unfairness and those who are not. If she asks him he will say he has had a good life--his brother in jail, his comrades blown up, and he risking himself daily in this war.
I am a man who fasts until I see what I want.
They would never have dropped such a bomb on a white nation.
But in reading The English Patient it occured over and over to me that that war, above all wars, must have been hell. It seems that the purity of our mission in that war works as a protective diaper to hide us from all the shit. As if because we had a clear enemy and that enemy was evil people didn't feel as much pain when they died, didn't scream as loud when their arms were blown off, didn't wallow in hospitals without skin for as long, and didn't grown in response to shredded nerves.
Time doesn't only provide an insulating factor; it allows truth to become maleable. With the loss of specificity that much time brings, also comes a simplicity and clarity that could not have been there. And so when we think about our current wars, it wants a good deal of chin-rubbing. Do we just look back on wars we won and call them glorious triumphs against the forces of evil, while the wars we lose we shake our heads and condemn the generations that started them as misguided imperialists or war-mongers. The Spanish-American war--that generation is laughable. Few history books have completmentary things for them. Korea and Vietnam (we must admit Korea has fallen into Vietnam's shaddow and doesn't seem to be mentioned by anyone at all anymore) we shake our heads and draw down our mouths in grim frowns of disappointment. How could our fathers and their fathers have been so misguided? And what will we look like when our children and the generations that come after them glance back at this page?
If we don't win (keeping in mind that winning may be as delicate a thing as the correct semantic argument--forgive my cynicism) we'll be subject to the same tight faces of chagrin. If we win...will it get white-washed with the same brush of righteousness that has coated every other war America has been victorious in? The victors do write history afterall.
As to The English Patient? Excellent. Strangely, it is a love story without feeling like one. I'm not sure who is or was falling in or out of love with who, but all the characters in The English Patient are full of love. Think about that when you read it. There are many pebbles and stones in Ondaatje's field, so take your heavy duty plow to this one.
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