Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Introduction: Blasphemers and Others
- 1 ‘Good? But what is good?’ Ethics after Ikonnikov
- 2 Our Brothers’ Keeper: Moral Witness
- 3 Angelus Novus: The Angel of History
- 4 Infidels and Miscreants: Love and War in Afghanistan
- 5 Trouble Makers: Laura Poitras and the Problem of Dissent
- 6 The Silage of History: Anselm Kiefer and the Kieferworld
- 7 Footfall: The Moral Economy of Reinhard Mucha
- 8 Tony Blair's Vietnam: The Iraq War and the Special Relationship
- 9 Accomplicity: Britain, Torture and Terror
- 10 Mending the World: Artists’ Manifestos
- 11 The Hallowed Mentor: Cézanne by Numbers
- 12 The Vacuity of Evil: Rumsfeld in Washington
- Index
3 - Angelus Novus: The Angel of History
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2016
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Introduction: Blasphemers and Others
- 1 ‘Good? But what is good?’ Ethics after Ikonnikov
- 2 Our Brothers’ Keeper: Moral Witness
- 3 Angelus Novus: The Angel of History
- 4 Infidels and Miscreants: Love and War in Afghanistan
- 5 Trouble Makers: Laura Poitras and the Problem of Dissent
- 6 The Silage of History: Anselm Kiefer and the Kieferworld
- 7 Footfall: The Moral Economy of Reinhard Mucha
- 8 Tony Blair's Vietnam: The Iraq War and the Special Relationship
- 9 Accomplicity: Britain, Torture and Terror
- 10 Mending the World: Artists’ Manifestos
- 11 The Hallowed Mentor: Cézanne by Numbers
- 12 The Vacuity of Evil: Rumsfeld in Washington
- Index
Summary
Proust says memory is of two kinds.
There is the daily struggle to recall
where we put our reading glasses
and there is the deeper gust of longing
that comes up from the bottom
of the heart
involuntarily.
At sudden times.
For surprise reasons.
Here is an excerpt from a letter Proust wrote
in 1913:
We think we no longer love our dead
but that is because we do not remember them:
suddenly
we catch sight of an old glove
and burst into tears.
Anne CarsonWe will remember them, as Laurence Binyon's threnody reminds us, each Remembrance Day. But how will we remember? And what will we remember, now that they are all dead? How are we to understand the Great War? What was it for them and for those who came after them? What is it for us? What will it become?
Our conception of this war, and every war, has been profoundly shaped by works of art, of all kinds and conditions. Among the English-speaking peoples, ‘war poetry’ has been virtually synonymous with Great War poetry for several generations. In more than one sense, the war poets served to define the Western Front. Theirs is the last word on that unsurpassable place, which has come to epitomize the character of the conflict, to colour (or rather to black and white) its collective memory, and to instantiate its meaning, in the polity and the culture. The poetry has trumped the history, as historians never cease to complain. The poetic voice is instantly recognizable. After the Somme, after Passchendaele, ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ no longer scans. It is ‘the pity of war’ that is the leitmotif and lightning conductor of strong feelings surrounding the political imperatives, the operational conduct, the moral calculus and the human cost of this war – and subsequent wars, right down to our own day. The voice carries, knowingly.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- On Good and Evil and the Grey Zone , pp. 43 - 60Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2015