While you dream, all end scene

[sovay]

So now we remember the remembrance, instead of the war itself. Perhaps we should have chosen a different memorial: poppies are the flower of the dead, but also of forgetting, and what with one myth and another they will follow their original function if we are not mindful, which is hard enough to do with the living. Every year I think it's harder. Every year it has to be done.

I feel so restless and un-anchored. We have lived in such an elemental way so long, things here don't look quite right to me somehow; or it may be the consciousness of my so limited time for freedom – so little time to do so many things bewilders me.
—Isaac Rosenberg, 21 September 1917

Comments

[sovay]

It's not Remembrance Day here

We don't have one ever, as I understand it—when Armistice Day was widely renamed, the Commonwealth went with Remembrance and the U.S. went with Veterans and I got hit with Kurt Vonnegut at an early age and despite being born well after the changeover always think of November 11 as Armistice Day. May is Memorial Day and I agree that the two are closely allied but distinct, like all the different Roman holidays for the dead. I was thinking of things like this tweet commemorating the anniversary of the first commemoration. It's as though the remembering shifts out another layer; it becomes even less real.

Not so old in some sense, but it's my impression from trips to the VA with my (WWII vet) father that a lot of the Viet Nam veterans have had a hard time, medically.

That is my understanding, too, and experience from within my own family. A lot of people hurt over a long time.