The Proud Tower: Barbara Tuchman's View of the World on the Road to War
Channel Firing BY THOMAS HARDY That night your great guns, unawares, Shook all our
The Proud Tower: Barbara Tuchman's View of the World on the Road to War
Channel Firing BY THOMAS HARDY That night your great guns, unawares, Shook all our coffins as we lay, And broke the chancel window-squares, We thought it was the Judgment-day
And sat upright. While drearisome Arose the howl of wakened hounds: The mouse let fall the altar-crumb, The worms drew back into the mounds,
The glebe cow drooled. Till God called, “No; It’s gunnery practice out at sea Just as before you went below; The world is as it used to be:
“All nations striving strong to make Red war yet redder. Mad as hatters They do no more for Christés sake Than you who are helpless in such matters.
“That this is not the judgment-hour For some of them’s a blessed thing, For if it were they’d have to scour Hell’s floor for so much threatening....
“Ha, ha. It will be warmer when I blow the trumpet (if indeed I ever do; for you are men, And rest eternal sorely need).”
So down we lay again. “I wonder, Will the world ever saner be,” Said one, “than when He sent us under In our indifferent century!”
And many a skeleton shook his head. “Instead of preaching forty year,” My neighbour Parson Thirdly said, “I wish I had stuck to pipes and beer.”
Again the guns disturbed the hour, Roaring their readiness to avenge, As far inland as Stourton Tower, And Camelot, and starlit Stonehenge.
We are about to embark on a great quest. That is to explore a world at war.
Of course we speak of World War I, which would come to be known as World War I. It is not only that we seek to explore that world and war, but to attempt to understand why it happened, what brought it about.
Not only should we seek to understand what brought it about we must be aware that we seek to do all these things regarding a world that existed one hundred years ago that went to war in 1914 and did not return to a state of uneasy peace until 1918. And in attempting to understand what surprised the world as the greatest conflagration the world to that point had ever witnessed, it becomes necessary to know what the world was like.
Who were the people who lived there. How did they live, what did they do. Nor can we begin to understand the hellish waterspout that sucked so many nations into the depths of seas tinged with blood without understanding that it was not merely a world of politics or property but a world of art, music, dance, and philosophy.
These are the conflicting aspects of culture that are inconsistent with the idea of war. The attempt to put these seemingly impossible inconsistencies together can bring about a great distubance of the human spirit that a world capable of music as beautiful as "The Rites of Spring," clashing with the quivering chords rising into a crescendo of horns that might sound the trumpets of doom, based on the writings of a man who died, mad, in an asylum, but whose philosophy was adopted by a nation as its theme, acknowledging the right, the need of exerting its power over whole nations out of a sense of nationalist fervor.
Such things are of the type that enter our dreams and become our nightmares as we sense the end of one world and the beginning of another. It is as though we are walking as somnambulists in a world unknown to us. For it is unknown to us. We must be capable of forgetting, unlearning the modern world of which we consider ourselves to be a part.
This is a journey that requires a guide. Just as Aligheri required a guide into the Inferno we must have our own Virgil. It is highly likely that we will find the need of a Beatrice for the war we will eventually explore was not a paradise, but a Hell as fiery as the first book of The Human Comedy.
As we speak of Virgil we must think of a world of epic stature, that grew as great as Rome and fell just as surely as Rome. In one way we are traveling through a world as ancient to us as we would consider a symbol of its literature, the Aeneid. In his journeys from the sacked city of Troy, Aeneas met and fell in love with the Queen of the Carthaginians, Dido. And Virgil commented that a nation should be ruled by a woman to be so foreign to his people he had to document "Dux femina facti" which means the leader of the thing was a woman.
So our guide is no Virgil. Our guide is a woman, Barbara Tuchman. And as it once was, once again "Dux femina facit."
To be continued...January 30, 2014.
Our Guide
Barbara Tuchman was born Barbara Wertheimer, January 30, 1912, the daughter of prominent banker Maurice Wertheimer. Well that didn't take long. Interrupted. 2/5/2014
I've not read Montaigne's Essays. But I will because of Bakewell's intriguing biography of Montaigne and her historical overview of how his work has bI've not read Montaigne's Essays. But I will because of Bakewell's intriguing biography of Montaigne and her historical overview of how his work has been interpreted by those who have read them since they were first published.
Montaigne was fortunate to be the third generation of a family not involved in the merchant trade. As a result he was considered a noble. It was not a status that he sought, but it was bestowed upon him by the culture in which he was born.
He was an introspective man who closely examined the manner in which he lived. His essays were a new kind of literature never written before he invented this style of writing. At the most simple level, we might consider Montaigne the world's first blogger. And his essays have captivated readers through the centuries, each generation interpreting his work within the context of their own time.
Virginia Woolf attributes Montaigne with having created a work capable of being interpreted by all those who have read them in a fashion wholly unique to them. The reader finds in Montaigne what he wants to find. And, to Woolf, it is the mark of great writing that connects people through the centuries, reading the same pages and interpreting them. As such, literature is the mind of civilization that stretches through time as long as the work exists. Through time other writers have embraced Montaigne's essays, feeling as if they had written them themselves. There is a sense of a universal "I" that emerges from the pages of Montaigne that, as Woolf says, is the requirement for a work to be considered a classic.
Montaigne's "philosophy," if one can call it that, is a blend of the ancient Stoics, Epicureans, and Skeptics. He took from it all and formulated a way in which he would live, learning to accept the idea of death without fear, moderation in religion and political thought, and the ability of looking at another individual and being able to place himself in his position and understand it without resorting to argument or violence.
It is amazing to know that Montaigne lived through some of the most dangerous times of French history. He was untouched by the violent religious civil wars between Catholic and Protestant. These were the days of the St. Bartholomew's Massacres. The gates to his estate were never locked. He became the reluctant Mayor of Bordeaux upon being elected to the position and filled that role for almost five years. He was essential in brokering the succession to the throne by Henry of Navarre, a Protestant from Henry III, a Catholic.
Montaigne wrote his essays over a period of twenty years, producing three editions of them. Because of his frankness and open revelation of all aspects of human life, his Essays were placed on the Index of Books banned by the Catholic Church for over a hundred years following his death. The only editions available were those that had been appropriately sanitized of the offensive sections, printed outside of France and smuggled back into the country where they remained constantly popular among people of all classes.
Widely read in his own time, he was considered a man ahead of his time by the illuminati of the Enlightenment. To the Libertines he was a great free thinker. He was adopted by the English as a voice of moderation. To the Modernists, he was a voice of reason, revealing the futility of violence and intolerance.
Perhaps Montaigne has been accepted by so many disparate schools of thought because he simply was able to capture the essence of what it meant to be human no matter what doctrine with which we seek to cover ourselves.
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