Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation

24. THE DRAMA SUITS THEM:

I was talking to Anne Carter Pinkerton at the edge of the woods where we’d somehow arrived after walking the very long ways diagonal across the park from top to bottom from very top where the Conservatory Gardens comes down from the Lake and then over to the site of McGowan’s (now a disreputable and ragged pile of compost and waste foliage and cuttings) and down across the center past the pool past the Ramble and the caves and the rocks and the bridges past the insanely lyrical deep center of the high park with its cavernous deep trees and respectfully silent bridges and coves and she talked just about nearly the entire way going on and on first this then that in a strangely civilized yet disheveled style of scattershot speaking which somehow almost represented a distorted mind : "Rupert Brooke expressed a wonderful concept of war and war’s dead in a short couplet he wrote about World War I in truly fine words – ‘If I should die think only this of me / that there’s some corner of a foreign field / that is forever England’ – and you know that has always been to me amidst the carnage and sadness of war a quaint evocation of the peacefulness of a soldier’s soul a sort of resignation about death and living and place and worth and the lost value of life that almost saddens me each time sort of like a ‘ours is not to wonder why / ours is but to do or die’ which is another Briticism by Kipling or someone about the Boer War or death in the Indian Service or something it hardly matters it’s nearly all the same but it’s always made me think of that especially weird way the English have always had of identifying with their native land or their country – that’s really something we don’t do here or have never yet done for as fleeting as all this American living is we very seldom or never properly get a foothold on it with the powerful strength and homiletic nostalgia that these others have had but maybe that’s only for reasons of the swiftness of our time and deeds and the accelerated way we’ve accommodated and absorbed everything here – so different as I see it from the time I spent in Britain where I often watched the slow and even presentment of everyday continuity and the scheduled comity of things and I’d really hate to see that go from England or anywhere else for that matter for you know when they say things like ‘America’ is taking over the world or that the United States and all its ways and products is suddenly everywhere it makes me quite sad really to think of all that’s to be lost - much like that British sense of ‘proper’ – that I truly almost wish the failure of purpose which some say now haunts America really does succeed and stop all this nonsense and Sigfried Sassoon also said something like ‘battalions battalions scarred from Hell’ in a piece called ‘Prelude: The Troops’ which he wrote to honor those men – and we can debate the definition of that word ‘honor’ all day can’t we for what really is honor ? is it honorable just to let a country or a cause just churn you up kill you or despoil you for the rest of your days and spit you out like rubbish or isn’t honor really a higher calling to object or refuse - to argue against or defy such silly means and motives as rabid men just yelling off to war ? and yes of course it is but for the many many who do not object then they will almost gleefully march off to their deaths and escaping that fate they will then instead live the remainder of their lives as if they had already died anyway for they become valueless and embroiled only in the bravado and continuation of that ‘war’ within them by a mental means of some same sort of paucity some pale vagueness they never manage to settle into and the real enemy to them becomes the world they must live in and at that point – sadly enough – I say ‘let them die’ for that is truly what they’ve wanted and the more brutal the death the better FOR THE DRAMA SUITS THEM."