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obsequious.
Alessandro followed him with his eyes, and smiled to himself because he knew that at that moment he was totally in control—in control not of Klodwig, not of the Hofburg, not of the war, and not of the world, but of himself.
CIVILIANS SELDOM understand that soldiers, once impressed into war, will forever take it for the ordinary state of the world, with all else illusion.
He knew that this was because the war was still in him, and that it would be in him for a long time to come, for soldiers who have been blooded are soldiers forever. They never fit in.
A hundred thousand miracles lay in wait, and millions of tragedies would have to be relived.
Many of the railroad workers stopped eating as he spoke, and if a railroad worker stopped eating, it meant that something was happening.
“That’s not the point, what He did or didn’t do for me. In fact, He did a great deal, but for some He’s done a lot less than nothing. Besides, one doesn’t believe in God or disbelieve in Him. It isn’t an argument.
His existence is not a question of argument but of apprehension. Either you apprehend God, or you do not.”
A fact of humanity throughout history is the desirability, the necessity, of balance among the intellect, the spirit, and the flesh.”
‘Madre, non dormi . . .’ from II Trovatore?”
Listen to it
Being the army, they must have thought that anyone who was killed three times was most certainly deader than if he had been killed only once.
“Each of the flashes is like the life of a man. We’re too weak to feel the full import of such a loss, and so we continue on, or we reduce it to an abstraction, a principle. It would take more than anyone could give to understand the life of one other person—we cannot understand even our own lives—and more energy and compassion than is humanly possible to commemorate even a single life that ends in such a death.
The death of a human
“The problem with war, as I have seen it, is not so much that it makes misery and grief—all of which would tend to come anyway, in time. The sin is in the abruptness, in the abridgement of those stages that otherwise might be joined so brilliantly to make a life.
In bayonet training throughout the world, the soldier who wields the bayoneted rifle is ordered to scream as he drives the blade through.
“You see how insane the world is, Nicolò? No matter that it is unbearably beautiful. How would I have guessed that during my last hours I would sit on a rock in the starlight, in mountain laurel, explaining sexual hygiene to an apprentice in a propeller factory.”
“His last words were spoken as if he had finally discovered what he had been seeking all his life. You know what he said? He said, ‘Moles dash in the wind!’
La Tempesta.
