Ireland

by Frank Delaney

I like to visit the houses—or the remains of houses—where great men lived or stayed on visits or the abbeys where the monks made their beautiful works, those sweet cloistered limestone

“Man shouldn’t make war, it opposes the natural spirit, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.” Now, I like it when people talk like that; I believe the world of the spirit is in general greatly neglected and not at all served by the practice of faith as we know it, because religion isn’t individual enough. So I said to him, “I’d love to hear a little more of what you mean.”

“War,” he said, “goes in the direction opposite to that in which man naturally wants to aim. Man wants peace and ease, so that he can work out the mysteries of life, but war introduces such chaos and actual physical pain that man can’t think. And that, of course, is what politicians want—they want us not to think.”