A Soldier of the Great War

by Mark Helprin

You’d be swept away by dreams, and miss the waking dreams.

“But one thing God does not give, something that must be earned, something that a lazy man can never know. Call it understanding, grace, the elevation of the spirit—call it what you will. It comes only of work, sacrifice, and suffering.

“You must give everything you have. You must love unto exhaustion, work unto exhaustion, and walk unto exhaustion.

People like that continually expose their souls to mortal danger in imagining that they are free of it, when, indeed, the only mortal danger for the spirit is to remain too long without it. The world is made of fire.”

disappointed by the slow and difficult, but Alessandro had learned to love these as much as or perhaps more than he loved the fast and easy. To him, they seemed not so far apart. It was almost as if, facing off invariably at odds, they conducted a secret liaison, with their hands enwrapped under the table.

“It passed me by, for when I was young I was sure of the good of the world, its beauty, and its ultimate justice. And even when I was broken the way one sometimes can be broken, and even though I had fallen, I found upon arising that I was stronger than before, that

the glories, if I may call them that, which I had loved so much and that had been darkened in my fall, were shining ever brighter. And nearly every time subsequently that I have fallen and darkness has come over me, they have obstinately arisen, not as they were, but brighter.

Fate, circumstances, and other men will at times be almost overwhelmingly against you. You’ll be able to beat them only if you don’t join them, only if you don’t condemn yourself from the start. If you have no faith in yourself, who will? I won’t.

You live on not by virtue of the things you have amassed, or the work you have done, but through your spirit, in ways and by means that you can neither control nor foresee.

perhaps because he knew that old cats and dying empires viciously insist upon decorum.

“I have no intention either of fighting storms or outrunning them, and I have no intention of accompanying anyone who tries. It doesn’t work. It never did, and it never will.”

The truth was often great enough to cover in its self-contradictory expanse at least six points of view, and where one was weak or incomplete the others continued the narrative.

The beauty of the Swiss watch lay in its precision, and its precision had sprung from modesty. It did not have to be an orrery or a tower clock any more than a yodeler has to sing in symphonies, and this friendliness to restriction had left the designers within easy reach of perfection.

“If I die tomorrow it will have been useless to have been afraid today.”

Rafi was suited perfectly to the mountains, for when he was tested and worn down to practically nothing, his soul was unencumbered, and it rose, drawing him closer to where he wanted to be.

Don’t go into crowds unless you can lead them, and don’t try to lead them until they need you.”

I think that the closer you are to power, the less you understand of what it is to be alive.”

Even death, Alessandro thought, would yield to beauty—if not in fact then in explanation—for the likeness of every great question

could be found in forms as simple as songs, and there, if not explicable, they were at least perfectly apprehensible.

“Music isn’t rational,” the Guitarist said. “It isn’t true. What is it? Why do mechanical variations in rhythm and tone speak the language of the heart? How can a simple song be so beautiful? Why does it steel my resolution to believe—even if I can hardly make a living.”

“If it weren’t for music,” the Guitarist answered, “I would think that love is mortal. If I weren’t a soldier, I might not have learned to stand against all odds.”

Perhaps it’s then, when you have neither pride nor power, that you are saved, brought to an unimaginably great reward.”

Alessandro loved the stars for being unassailable, and believed that each and every one of them was his ally. As if they were jewels that he possessed, and he were a different man altogether, they gave him tremendous satisfaction. Though war might make a soldier inconsequential, a soldier in turn could delight that they would always put war in its place.

I didn’t know God until I saw them. Its funny, as soon as you lose faith, you have children, and life reawakens.”

In the end, beauty was inexplicable, a matter of grace rather than of the intellect, like a song.

Given another chance, they would fight like Gurkhas, but, then again, if all the soldiers in the line knew that the only penalty for desertion was simply to be returned to the line, the line would evaporate. Though Alessandro found it nearly impossible to believe that habit, custom, and civilization could be so strong as to compel the ten men below to walk to their deaths, he knew that when

civilization, habit, and custom do not exist, executions proceed apace, even if with less formality and less warning.

he imagined substituting for all the clocks of Europe a more honest machine, a finely threaded spiral of three dimensions, that would signify not only the coming and going of day and night, but that no single day and no single night would ever return.

“What is it? It’s the overwhelming combination of all that I’ve seen, felt, and cannot explain, that has stayed with me and refused to depart, that drives me again and again to a faith of which I am not sure, that is alluring because it will not stoop to be defined by so inadequate a creature as man. Unlike Marxism, it is ineffable, and it cannot be explained in

words.”

“It was easy to be clever, but hard to look into the face of God, who is found not so much by cleverness as by stillness.”

“Is that why so many foolish people believe in God?” “If an idiot sees the sun does it mean that the sun doesn’t exist?”

“I would rather be lost in the breakers than on some flimsy platform above the sea.”

Never will anyone know you better than he who has known you when everything you have has been stripped away.

It was because the world had a life of it own. Leave winter

alone or watch it to death, it would still gradually turn to summer. Miracles and paradoxes could be explained by the marvelously independent courses of their elements, and perhaps real beauty could be partially understood in that it was not just a combination, but a dissolution; that after the threads were woven and tangled they then untangled and continued on their separate ways; that the trains that pulled into the station in a riveting spectacle as clouds of steam condensed in the midnight air, then left for different destinations and disappeared; that the drama of a striking

clock was impossible without the silence that was both its preface and epilogue. Music was a chain forged half of silences and half of sound, love was nothing without longing and loss, and were time not to have at its end the absence of time, and the absence of time ...

Young children see so clearly things of poignant detail, even if they soon learn to forget.”

You believe in entropy, which postulates that all phenomena tend to sink to lower levels of organization and energy, and in evolution, which postulates that the history of life has been just the opposite.

To see the beauty of the world is to put your hands on lines that run uninterrupted through life and through death. Touching them is an act of hope, for perhaps someone on the other side, if there is another side, is touching them, too.”

“In a sense, they are one and the same. You can’t understand science without art, or art without science. Only the idiots in the two disciplines think that they are anything but two different expressions of the same thing.”

You take earthly pleasures and gracefully translate them to the language of the Divine.” “That’s called art,” Alessandro said. “But what if death is only a void?” “Even if heaven doesn’t exist, I will have experienced it beforehand, because I will have created it.” “What about pleasure and

light-heartedness?” “You can be as light-hearted as you want, and still be devoted.”

“I told you that the only thing I had left was the truth. And the truth will carry me through death.

In having come to terms with death, you’ll have a marvelous life, no matter what happens to you.”

“Reason excludes faith,” Alessandro responded, watching the blood-red mite as it made a dash for the rim. “It’s deliberately limited. It won’t function with the materials of religion. You can come close to proving the existence of God by reason, but you can’t do it absolutely. That’s because you can’t do anything absolutely by reason. That’s because reason depends on postulates. Postulates defy proof and yet they are essential to reason. God is a postulate. I don’t think God is interested in the verification of His existence, and, therefore, neither am I. Anyway, I have

professional reasons to believe. Nature and art pivot faithfully around God. Even dogs know that.”

Of the infinite variety of angles and intersections that make a smile, language has no inkling:

The reason people oversalt chicken soup is so that they can pretend to be eating something that is virtually nothing, but the truth of virtually nothing is worth infinitely more than a lie that makes almost nothing into a lot

Never give up, never despair, let no mystery confound you into the conclusion that mystery cannot be yours.’”