All Quiet on the Western Front

by Erich Maria Remarque

From the earth, from the air, sustaining forces pour into us--mostly from the earth. To no man does the earth mean so much as to the soldier. When he presses himself down upon her long and powerfully, when he buries his face and his limbs deep in her from the fear of death by shell-fire, then she is his only friend, his brother, his mother; he stifles his terror and his cries in her silence and her security; she shelters him and releases him for ten seconds to live, to run, ten seconds of life; receives him again and often for ever. Earth!--Earth!--Earth! Earth with thy folds, and hollows, and holes, into which a man may fling himself and crouch down. In the spasm of terror, under the hailing of annihilation, in the bellowing death of the explosions, O Earth, thou grantest us the great resisting surge of new-won life.

Terrifying and beutiful in equal measure, mesmerizing me into stuper of thought where on the one hand I seek salvation from it's deadly embrace; yet on the other I desire to seek more. More about the sweet comforts of what we all take for granted, more about how the cruelty of man and the horrors of war amplify the serene wonders of our once mundane enviroments. This passage has a deeper existential aura reverberating through every word, hopping from sentence to sentence, reminding me how when faced with the fragility of life we bring out among us new conceptions of our reality. Gone are the fleeting thoughts of whimsy or the petty concerns which once ruled our minds with their trite. Replaced with the simple observations of the present, and the desire to remain just a little longer on this Earth we so callously overlooked until its too late.