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Last Word - August is over...
I write this in August, when I returned from a holiday and suddenly found myself wondering what was so familiar about some words which came unbidden into my mind. I wondered what the source might be and who had written them.
I found the words eventually in print; not only the few words I had remembered but the whole passage my mind had stumbled over.
Perhaps I should, instead of writing it here, turn it into a competition, the winner to be the first to find the source of the quotation, the title of the poem and the name of the author. Perhaps it would be tedious. To save anyone who might want to know, the words are in Louis MacNeice's “Autumn Journal” and the part I had to an extent remembered reads;
“August is nearly over, the people back from holiday are tanned with blistered thumbs and a wallet of snaps and a little joie de vivre which is contraband …..”
The poem dates from C1939. This was a period when the increasing likely-hood of war hung over people's heads like a dark and darkening cloud. After a war in 1914 – 18 which the older poets could remember and the younger poets were young during the General Strike and the Depression, it was almost impossible for a young poet to be unmarked by the tragedy of the times and the greater tragedy still to come. Even on 1 st September, 1939, W. H. Auden wrote;
“Uncertain and afraid as the clever hopes expire of a low and dishonest decade ….”
What has all this to do with the here and now? We cannot, I suggest, escape the consequences of the past. For example, what is happening now in Russia, Georgia and the other countries (or would-be countries) seems to have arisen from the previous actions of the now defunct communist era in that part of the world. Our own country's reactions also, in many ways, appear to be rooted in our experiences of dictatorship in Russia and the long ‘cold war'.
There is nothing very original in what I have written here. What is not just original, but crucial to us, is the revelation the world has been given through Christ. He knew that he was the ‘Messiah'. When Peter began to realise this, Christ warned him not to repeat in public what he, Peter, was saying. In the end, it was the error of the disciples, the Jewish authorities and Pilate about what the advent of the Messiah was that promoted Jesus' unjust trial and unjust sentence. We need to be careful ourselves what we see as the meaning of our times. What happens now, is tomorrow's history.
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Bob Mclean
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