Subject: Re: Band of Brothers
From: Tim O'Connor (oconnort@nyu.edu)
Date: Tue Oct 09 2001 - 07:40:44 GMT
On Tue, Oct 09, 2001 at 09:39:27AM +0100, Scottie Bowman wrote:
> Both Paul & Tim tell us they’re grateful not to have been so
> challenged. And surely we all feel this in our bones. But I certainly
> also feel – along with many of my generation, just too young
> for the second world war & just too old for subsequent ones –
> that I missed what so many of my elders regard as the defining
> event of their lives; & that I’m thereby diminished forever
> in some very central way.
I agree with you that many have felt that war was the defining moment
of their lives. I've heard this sentiment before. However that is,
though, I do not regret missing the experience (especially wars in my
lifetime, when it was not always easy to know why the fighting took
place -- there having been no enemy as identifiable as Hitler and no
nation-states as obviously menacing as the Axis alliance -- and so
many acts of war seemed colored more by politics or global-scale games
of Monopoly) and therefore I suppose I have had to locate my "defining
moment" elsewhere.
For me, then, that moment was as traumatic for me as Piave or Hurtgen
or the Battle of the Bulge or Normandy was for others, but it was
personal (not for consumption here) and it didn't cause me to (as
Scottie so eloquently said yesterday, and I paraphrase roughly here)
run across a field with the taste of copper pennies in my mouth,
knowing that each breath I drew might be my last. Oh, the copper penny
taste was there, but the experience was wholly internal.
Funny, isn't it, how we conceive of "defining moments" as
intrinsically negative, life-threatening, traumatizing? I wonder if
anyone could cite a positive such moment....
> My guess is that without that mortar wound on the Piave,
> we’d never have lived ‘In our Time’ & without the Hurtgen Forest
> we’d never have met Holden.
I'd have to agree with you on that. There certainly would be no Esme,
either, nor Frederic Henry.
On the other hand, we have Nick Carraway and Gatsby from the hand of a
fellow whose defining moment may have been getting Zelda to accept his
marriage proposal; we have "Dubliners" from a man who spent much of his
life celebrating June 16th and his birthday as HIS eternally memorable
moments; we have an immortal legacy of haunting paintings of people and
sunflowers and sunny rooms and echoing landscapes from a man who lopped
off part of his ear and presented it wordlessly to a prostitute -- and
these are examples that come to mind quickly, before I have downed a cup
of coffee. Clearly there are others, too, who by force of will managed
to create their visions by some other means.
I won't speak for Paul (who represents himself quite well), but I can't
help feeling that I would never have been an asset on a battlefield, and
that I needed to be shaped elsewhere, by different means, and that my
contribution -- whatever it may be -- must spring from a different source.
Part of me generalizes a bit, reasoning that the kernel in the creative
mind is not so much the moment of battle (for there were many who lived
through it and sloughed it off and moved on silently to other things) as
it is the tendency to focus relentlessly on What Happened, and to relive
it and nurture that moment of trauma until it blooms into what can be
milked creatively.
Certainly Hemingway never stopped mulling over the mortar that had his
name on it -- that moment when, as he described it later, his soul left
his body, then came back -- and I'll wager that Salinger to this day says
some little prayer of thanks that he wakes up in his bed rather than in
a foxhole in Germany.
Gee, this is morose, isn't it? But thanks for setting off a chain of
thoughts, Scottie. I never would have started the day so thoughtfully
without your message to spur me.
--tim
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