{"id":4291,"date":"2011-08-30T07:13:10","date_gmt":"2011-08-30T07:13:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=4291"},"modified":"2011-08-30T07:23:53","modified_gmt":"2011-08-30T07:23:53","slug":"carl-prine-recommended-reading","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=4291","title":{"rendered":"Carl Prine: recommended reading"},"content":{"rendered":"

[ by Charles Cameron<\/strong> — war, reading lists ]<\/p>\n

.<\/p>\n

Not exactly delighted by the reading list recently provided by the inbound Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Carl Prine<\/strong> at Line of Departure<\/a> will be offering a “weekly discussion about how one might know one’s self” – Sun Tzu<\/strong> suggests that such knowledge is of value to the professional soldier — via texts other than the “middlebrow books of a recent vintage, pulp paperbacks” of the Army’s recommended readings.<\/p>\n

Today he opened with an essay on the First World War poet Siegfried Sassoon<\/strong>, and quoted the final paragraph from Sassoon’s Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man<\/em>:<\/p>\n

And here I was, with my knobkerrie in my hand, staring across at the enemy I’d never seen. Somewhere out of sight beyond the splintered tree-tops of Hidden Wood a bird had begun to sing. Without knowing why, I remembered that it was Easter Sunday. Standing in that dismal ditch, I could find no consolation in the thought that Christ was risen. I sploshed back to the dug-out to call the others up for “stand-to.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I could only respond with a passage that I first encountered, likewise, on a blog – Pat Lang<\/strong>‘s Sic Semper Tyrannis<\/a> – from Sassoon’s friend and fellow poet of the Great War, Wilfred Owen<\/strong>:<\/p>\n

For 14 hours yesterday, I was at work-teaching Christ to lift his cross by the numbers, and how to adjust his crown; and not to imagine he thirst until after the last halt. I attended his Supper to see that there were no complaints; and inspected his feet that they should be worthy of the nails. I see to it that he is dumb, and stands mute before his accusers. With a piece of silver I buy him every day, and with maps I make him familiar with the topography of Golgotha.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And I think to myself how much more power there is in either one of those paragraphs, than in that quip about “no atheists in foxholes”.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

It’s not a matter of one of those “God or no God” debates in which some clergyman might triumph over some atheist, or vice versa<\/em>, on TV or at the town or village hall. It’s a matter of cultural riches, of having a reference base of image and story that’s strong enough to express the horrors of Passchendaele or the Marne in a way that speaks to the hearts of those who were not there — and of those who will find themselves there, all too really, in other times and other lands.<\/p>\n

It’s about narrative deep enough to go with you to Golgotha and back<\/strong>. It’s about the words, and about the furnace.<\/p>\n

Prine himself puts it like this:<\/p>\n

I care only of your soul and how it might be fired in the smithy of this blog and then hammered by your experiences in the coming years.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Our culture is the smithy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[ by Charles Cameron — war, reading lists ] . Not exactly delighted by the reading list recently provided by the inbound Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Carl Prine at Line of Departure will be offering a “weekly discussion about how one might know one’s self” – Sun Tzu suggests that such knowledge is of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[350,321,526,215,627,663,19,95,1,589],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4291","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-army","category-blogosphere","category-charles-cameron","category-culture","category-doublequotes","category-poetry-of-war","category-recommended-reading","category-sic-semper-tyrannis","category-uncategorized","category-wwi"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4291","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4291"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4291\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4291"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4291"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4291"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}