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It was only now that she understood how difficult it must have been for him, to like her and to be petitioned by her at the same time.
This chapter reveals how Mary pressed for a teaching job at the same time that she pressed for a relationship with Tom.
More will come once the parents realize that there isn’t to be any bombing.”
Glossy fillies that we are, keeping dutifully in our lanes.”
An illusion to the rigid societal structure..
This chapter draws a huge distinction between Mary and Hilda.
she was enjoying the war. The passions, which had been confused against the general glare, could flicker in the blackout.
Far out there in the night somewhere, his best friend was shivering in a bunk, with bromide in his tea and postcards of Betty Grable. Tom felt guilty again, and sighed.
Tom’s guilt
To be in love was to understand how alone one had been before. It was to know that if one were ever alone again, there would be no exemption from the agony of it. It wasn’t the happiest feeling.
To be in love
quotidian
New word means “daily”
had seemed the most important thing that had ever happened to him.
Tom’s innocence
“How glad I am. What are you thinking?”
This is the second incident where she dissembles the first was when he asked her if she had ever slept with another man and she said yes. Now the second where she did not allow him to know that she was from wealth.
“Why would I not be all right?” He thought about her
Here begins a series of what if. The stream of consciousness seems to show that he is quite insecure and indecisive.
But to have faith—that a lover would be constant and life clement—this did require courage in a city more disposed to beginnings than safe continuations.
Courage
Both of them are very uncertain
milling rings
New word – bifurcated - went into different directions
Lachrymose – given to producing tears or teary-eyed
He leaned his forehead against the train window, breathing hard. He watched the green fields rush by. Only this was real, he told himself: this ripening wheat, that flint-walled barn, those ewes. What he had not understood, before battle, was that time could become a ribbon to be looped and pinned back to its center, the petals of a black rosette.
How time seemed in war
With his handkerchief he wiped away the sweat and the train soot. In the Strand, bodies careened off him. Everyone jostled and bumped. There was a new way of moving that he could not seem to weave himself into. The city was in a gasping hurry but
Beginning of a description of PTSD.
caught the first train out to his parents’ place.
The more he ought to concentrate, the more his thoughts wandered.
Is this some kind of learning disability that Zachary had?
Pissoirs– a public urinal
bilabial.
Vocabulary
Trilby - felt hat
cannibalized in a systematic, orderly and documented fashion according to a protocol that doubtless already existed in the contingency files of one of the more tight-lipped ministries. Those left alive would be grateful for death by the time the city fell. “So everything will be fine?” said Thomas.
The authors writing technique is on display here. He has two opposing ideas related. He talks about the horrors of war, and then says everything will be just fine.
Refractory means stubborn unmanageable
look what we did: we saved the zoo animals and the nice children, and we damned the afflicted and the blacks.
Perhaps life just turned a person who tried harder into a person who felt they must write it on someone else’s report.
Life could be ...
“But what good is it to teach a
child to count, if you don’t show him that he counts for something?”
Teaching value
Lessons from war
This was what he had not understood, until the war: that all men were of one blood, embedded from king to serf in a perfectly rigid formalism and all quietly abstracting themselves from it. The men did it with fighting and cheap women, the officers with theater and costly ones. Alone in
his mind each man knew himself free as a king, while the King alone knew himself enslaved.
Lessons from war #2
The doctor called him in after ten minutes. He was a portly man with side whiskers, in a white cotton jacket with gold insignia—the effect, to Alistair’s eye, falling somewhere between avuncular surgeon and cruise ship maître d’. The man remained seated behind his desk, not looking up when Alistair came in. “Heath?” he said. “Doctor.” “Be seated. Nothing the matter, I hope?” “Nothing,” said Alistair. “No aches, pains, unscheduled loss of limbs?” “I find I don’t much care for seafood.” “Good man,” said the doctor, inking his rubber stamp. Holding it poised over Alistair’s paper, he looked up
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“Thank you,” said Alistair, standing. “Very good.” Alistair hesitated in the doorway. “There is one thing.” “Yes?” The doctor was fanning the papers on his desk, looking for the next fellow’s. “A few of the chaps I was friendly with . . . well, they didn’t make it back from France. And now . . . well, I do seem to keep myself to myself, rather.” “Quite right,” said the doctor. “Take it steady until you feel brighter.” But Alistair still hesitated, wondering if there was a better way to put it. The men were good at calling the war a bastard and laughing at the mess it made of one’s nerves. But
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How the doctor completely missed Alastairs Xtreme PTSD.
taken cover on a Saturday afternoon,
just as he was thinking of some nice way to introduce himself, her skin took on the uneasy suggestion of bubbling and scorching and her hand—reaching
But her freckled face burned to bones before his eyes.
Drink was the warm resin that enveloped living bodies, fixing them in the amber of the present.
Vol de Nuit.
How ordinary Hilda was, beside Mary—and
After the hard planes and the hard tanks had come hard men in hard formations, banging their boots in adamant time. A terrible hardness was how it had seemed to Alistair: a preternatural hardness
reach for a corkscrew instead, every time some brass hat ordered artillery.
How to conduct a war
word blindness.”
Dyslexia, ADHD,, ?
on the piles of brick and timber, digging out civilians and parts of civilians. There had been some competition to see which teams could clear houses the quickest. There had been a grown hand holding an infant hand, with neither attached to anything. There had been an accordion with the Bakelite case blistered and charred. It had helped to be drunk.
Result of the blitz on London
in yesterday’s dress with her hair disheveled, she could make the distance between them disappear.
Mary - Alistair has feelings for her and she for him.
The eye may be an obligate scout but the heart is not an incurable follower.
Does this mean that one’s mind has control of one’s feelings?
Sometimes, Hilda, though I try not to, I think you impossibly spoiled.”
savior had come to earth who could heal and forgive, but that what everyone sang about was the local guesthouse being full.
She shook her head. “We must take turns, don’t you think? Every time one of us is buried like this, we shall dig the other out.”
The purpose of the relationship
