Posting for Water Water Everywhere challenge.
Tag: Mondays
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Posting for Cee’s Flower of the Day.
When self returned from the Philippines, end of April, this rose was in bad shape. It looked like it was starving: sparse leaves, riddled with rust and blackspot. But, as dear blog readers can see, it has since made a full recovery!
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This is the second summer for self’s Moonlight Romantica. It’s grown huge, taller than self.
Posting for Cee’s Flower of the Day.
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Took this picture of Annagmakerrig Lake on my last night at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, last November.
Posting for Jez’s Water, Water Everywhere Challenge # 176.
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Ernst Junger was a nineteen-year-old, stuck in a war. He’s been wounded twice, the second time by a sniper who shot both his legs.
Does he become bitter? Does he ask, Why me?
No. He writes:
- Every afternoon, I would hobble along the banks of a bleak-looking canal under bare poplars . . . After two weeks, I returned to my troop.
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This rose bloomed while I was in Mendocino. It must have been very hot: the edges of the bloom are crisped.
The pictures aren’t all that sharp. I decided to use my Nikon Coolpix. I’ll try again using my cell.
Posting for Cee’s Flower of the Day.
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That very first night, I lost my way in the pitch black and almost drowned in the swamp of the Tortille stream. It was a place of unfathomable mystery; only the night before, a munitions cart had disappeared without trace in a vast shell-crater hidden under a crust of mud . . . Suddenly, a little puff of wind brought up a sweetish, onion-y smell, and at the same time I heard the shout go up in the woods: “Gas, gas, gas!” From a distance the cry sounded oddly small and plaintive, not unlike a chorus of crickets.”
— Storm of Steel, p. 114Dear blog readers, these passages are lifted from a 19-year-old’s diary. Yet he is able to write with such detachment.
With weeping eyes, I stumbled back to the Vaux woods, plunging from one crater into the next, as I was unable to see anything from the misted visor of my gas mask. With the extent and inhospitableness of its spaces, it was a night of eerie solitude.
— Storm of Steel, p. 114Junger feels profound loneliness, but something happens to remind him that he is not, in fact, alone. He is shot in both legs by a sniper.
Stay tuned.
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At The Somme:
- At three in the afternoon my sentries came to me from the left and stated that they were unable to hold out where they were any longer, as their holes had been shot away. I had to display my full authority to get them back to their stations.
The sentence of the day:
- We might be crushed, but surely we could not be conquered.
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Are you getting whiplash? So am I!
We’re back with the 19-year-old Ernst Junger, who signed up on the first day of the War, August 1, 1914. It’s now December 27, and the first entry in the diary: Junger detrains in Champagne.
“No finer death in all the world than . . . ” Anything to participate, not to have to stay at home!
Finally we reached Orainville, one of the typical hamlets of the region, and the designated base for the 73rd Rifles, a group of fifty brick and limestone houses, grouped round a chateau in parkland.
Used as we were to the order of cities, the higgledy-piggledy life on the village streets struck us as exotic.
There is such a knowing air to this passage! Sure this was written when Junger was just 19? Maybe some bits were added later? I’m thinking, in particular, about that last sentence, the one about “the order of cities . . . It seemed that, if anything, life was a little slower and duller here, an impression strengthened by the evidence of dilapidation in the village.“
Onward!
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This concept (Depth of Focus) is so beautifully described (still on the Introduction to Storm of Steel — if this book is full of the ‘blood lust,’ this Introduction may be as close as I get to Ernst Junger) by Michael Hofmann:
- “While the most characteristic depth of focus of the book is maybe ten yards or so — the interiors, the trenches and dugouts, the cars and lorries, the ruined houses, the beautiful, cultivated catalogues of war junk (like the one on p. 94) — still, there are also equally memorable distance shots, repeatedly of the sky, and of the colors and sounds of various ordnance, moments of eerie contemplation, like the background of a Renaissance portrait, and with just that in-and-out effect . . . “
Wow! I mean . . . WOW!
Kanlaon 