I’ve now been sent more than one link to this photo essay from the International Business Times, showing a series of then-and-now photographs from the Normandy landing sites and their immediate vicinity.  The photography is pretty well done, and of course the contrast between what was going on that day 70 years ago today and what goes on there now is moving on any of several different levels.

So it’s tacky of me to quibble with it.  But I am — or try to be — a stickler for saying things correctly, and not over-blowing statements.  I do experience something of a jolt when I see a statement like this:  “On June 6, 1944, Allied soldiers descended on the beaches of Normandy for D-Day, an operation that turned the tide of the Second World War against the Nazis, marking the beginning of the end of the conflict.”  What I have an issue with is the expression “turned the tide of the Second World War.”

Taking nothing away from the men who stormed ashore there, and the men who died trying, and the men who suffered and died to make the whole thing possible although they never got close enough even to see a smudge of France along the horizon, but whatever else it did do, the Allied invasion of France in June, 1944 did NOT “turn the tide of the Second World War.”  Germany had lost the war.  She had lost it no later than the surrender at Stalingrad.  Her last major offensive in the East was a distant memory by summer, 1944.  Even had the U.S. and the British (among whom I include the Canadians, the Aussies, and the Kiwis) not succeeded in opening a second front in the West, the Soviet Union would have gone on to defeat Germany.  Would have taken longer, and a lot more Germans and Soviets would have died.  But the swastika would have come down all the same.

What D-Day very much turned the tide on was the post-war world.  Had Stalin defeated Hitler with his own troops the only ones with boots on the ground, does anyone really think he would have handed over any portion of Germany to the Western allies’ control?  Would he even have allowed France or Italy to enjoy any independence?

The Yalta Conference, at which the boundaries of post-war Europe were carved up, and the Eastern Europeans cynically (or cravenly, take your pick) handed over to Stalin was held in February, 1945, by which time the Red Army was in Prussia proper, the Ardennes offensive in December, 1944 had collapsed, and even Hitler had to have known it was game, set, and match.  Even with the Western allies standing on the Rhein, practically, Stalin still plucked the goose pretty thoroughly.  What would have happened at a Yalta Conference with Eisenhower sacked, Montgomery running about the place whining that it was all Patton’s fault, and Stalin having his communist operatives in the French underground scoping out locations for the new NKVD execution cellars?  Would there even have been a Yalta Conference?  Why should there have been, under those circumstances?  Stalin sure as hell didn’t care how many Soviet soldiers he got killed on his way west (after the war he sent most of the ones who’d seen the west to the Gulag camps).  What incentive, from his perspective, would he have had not to tell Roosevelt and Churchill, “You know what?  I’ll just take whatever my troops can conquer.  You promised me a second front and I don’t see a second front.  All bets are off.”  Even if the U.S. and Britain had pulled out of the European war Stalin still would have marched into what was left of Berlin.

D-Day made sure that such a scenario never had the chance to occur.  The men whose corpses washed gently to and fro in the surf made only a hypothetical material contribution to defeating Hitler.  But their lives were not given in vain.  Oh no:  They made sure that there would in fact be a free Europe when the war was over.  The hundreds of millions of Europeans who have lived in freedom since that day owe those freedoms to those men and their comrades who came after them.

And for that, we will forever remember and honor them.

31 May 1916.  The German High Seas Fleet is coming out, hoping to draw out some of the British Grand Fleet and pounce on it before the rest of it can come up.  Unknown to the Germans, the British, using the Room 40 decrypts they enjoyed thanks to the Russians’ having had the pluck and sense to strip SMS Magdeburg of her code books in 1914 and then the generosity to turn them over to the Royal Navy, knew precisely where they intended to go and what they intended to do.  So Jellicoe got the entire Grand Fleet underway to meet them.

The stage was thus set for the Armageddon-style naval battle that every commander since Nelson had sought.  Here a brief historical overview might be of assistance.  Prior to Nelson, battle fleets fought and had for 140-plus years fought in line-ahead formation.  To some extent it made sense because wooden warships mount their guns in broadside only, and those guns have only limited ability to be trained out of the strictly perpendicular to the keel.  The ends of a wooden ship — especially the stern — are much thinner than its sides, and much shorter.  So even though you might mount a few bow-chasers or stern-chasers so you wouldn’t be complete impotent, those guns represented only a tiny fraction of the ship’s total weight of firepower.  To put some numbers on it, of a first-rate’s 98 or more heavy guns, ranging from 18-pounders to 32-pounders, maybe a total of eight or ten would be mounted outside of the broadside batteries.  In line ahead, where each ship follows the one ahead of it as closely as it safely can, you concentrate and mutually reinforce the fleet’s individual broadsides, and you also prevent the opposing fleet’s ships from piercing the line and firing its concentrated broadside against the largely unprotected bow or (even worse) the stern, almost completely unprotected by heavy timbers.

Gentle Reader will rapidly perceive the logical development of this tactic, though, along the principle of sauce for the gander.  Both fleets adopt the line ahead.  Now, a fleet in line ahead is not going to be able effectively to pierce the opponent’s line along its length.  That would produce a geometry looking like a cross-member tire iron.  While the fleet piercing the line will be able to concentrate its fire on the ends of the ships between which it sails, the other fleet will be able to concentrate its fire on the ends of the ships nearest its line where pierced.  Stymie, in other words.  The dynamic is entirely different if you can, not pierce, but cross the opponent’s line ahead of it.  It’s called “crossing the T,” and it’s the holy grail of battle line tactics.  Of course, now you’ve crossed the T, what do you do?  You’re still line ahead, only on the other side of your enemy, and now he “has the weather gauge of you,” meaning he is upwind of you, a crucially important tactical advantage in the era of square-rigged battle fleets.

The upshot of all of the above considerations was that from its formal adoption in the 1660s all the way up to the late 1700s, naval battles, at least when on the high seas where there wasn’t a lee shore you could run your enemy onto (as at Quiberon Bay, in 1759), tended to be indecisive.  Oh sure, occasionally a ship would have the misfortune to be so disabled as not to be able to stay in line.  She’d drift out on her own and be surrounded and captured.  Beyond individual misfortune such as that, however, naval battles just didn’t decide a whole lot.  That’s not to say sea power as such was indecisive, because it very much was.  It’s just that the effectiveness of main battle fleets against each other was limited.

Still the line ahead made sense, by and large, and it made enough sense that the Royal Navy formally incorporated it into Fighting Instructions, its mandatory combat manual.  Woe betide the captain who broke line.  Woe betide the admiral who failed to maintain his battle line.

Until Nelson.

Nelson realized two things, one strategic and the other tactical.  His strategic insight was that the line ahead was never going to produce a strategic-level result precisely because it could not be expected to produce a battle where one fleet was largely destroyed by the other.  His tactical insight was that the virtues of the line of battle were strongest when the two fleets were of equal quality in seamanship and gunnery.  But if one fleet was significantly the other’s superior, then it might well be able to sail sufficiently exactly as to pierce the enemy’s line in multiple places simultaneously, and the difference in gunnery would significantly reduce the damage inflicted while doing so.  This would then place the better fleet’s ships close alongside their counterparts, where their superior gunnery stood the best chance of achieving decisive results.  Nelson further realized that, after a dozen or so years of purge, guillotine, and neglect, the Royal Navy had attained that level of mastery over the French.

The validity of Nelson’s insights was proved dramatically at Trafalgar in 1805.  Nelson divided his fleet into two squadrons, abandoned the line ahead to hoist the signal “general chase,” and then drove his fleet like two mailed fists into the straggling, disordered, bumbling combined French and Spanish fleets.  There developed a general melee in which Nelson’s parting instruction to his captains that, “No captain can do very wrong who places his ship alongside that of a Frenchman,” bore fruit.  Two-thirds of the combined fleet was sunk or captured that afternoon, and British hegemony at sea assured for another century-plus.  Nelson died that day, but not before receiving the news of his victory.

From Trafalgar onward, every naval officer in every country dreamed of another Trafalgar.  Mahan dreamed of it, and wrote it into his book.  Fisher dreamed of it, and built Dreadnought and her descendants to make it happen.  Tirpitz dreamed of it but was realist enough to understand it wasn’t likely against the British.  Jellicoe dreamed of it; Scheer dreamed of it; Beatty dreamed of it.

And in May, 1916 it seemed as though it was to happen.  Britain and Germany together floated dozens and dozens of massive Castles of Steel (to borrow Robert K. Massie’s book title), each capable of hurling up to a dozen massive armor-piercing shells, weighing anywhere from 900 to 1,800 pounds each, miles and miles, to fall onto the enemy’s decks, bulkheads, and hulls.  Their populaces had internalized the image of knights clad in armor, smiting each other hip and thigh in noble combat.

Except it wasn’t quite so.  Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty from 1910 until 1915, attempted to correct his fellow Members’ understanding.  Two modern dreadnoughts in battle, he said, were not correctly thought of as two plated and mailed knights hacking at each other with swords, but rather as two eggs striking at each other with hammers.  And by 1916 the hammers weren’t even the most dangerous threat.  Mines and torpedoes, the former more than the latter, could explode beneath the giants’ armor belts, below the waterline, and in a matter of minutes destroy the work of years.  As in fact happened to the brand-new dreadnought HMS Audacious, sunk by a mine in October, 1914, fourteen months after she was commissioned.  Admiral Jellicoe, the Grand Fleet’s commander, fully realized the peril.  Shortly after the war started he declared his belief that chasing a retreating German fleet back towards Germany was a mistake, as it was every bit as likely to be a ruse, to draw the British over minefields.  He announced an intention to avoid falling into that trap (and his stated intention received the Admiralty Lords’ blessing, it should not be overlooked).

And so the fleets sailed towards each other, through the haze and fog banks of a North Sea early summer.  The Germans had no idea of what was headed their way until the fleets’ respective scouts went to investigate a fishing trawler each sighted.  Each fleet’s closest squadron just happened to be its battlecruisers, and here is where we get to this post’s title.

Battlecruisers were, like Dreadnought herself, an invention of Admiral Jackie Fisher.  They had a dreadnought’s heavy guns, but they were to be fast, like jungle cats (in fact they were referred to, both in the press and in the fleet, in those terms).  Now folks, the laws of physics apply with even greater brutality on the ocean than they do on land.  You’ve got three things and you can’t have them all at once: guns, armor, and speed.  If you want more of one you’re going to have to skimp on the others.  That’s just the way it works.  So Fisher chose to skimp on the armor leg of that triangle.

Fisher’s original vision had been a ship fast enough to catch any major ship it could out-gun, and by like token to run away from anything that could match or out-gun it.  Logical enough, and indeed that is precisely how things worked out in the fall of 1914.  German Admiral Maximilian von Spee’s Pacific Squadron had jumped a couple of elderly British cruisers off the coast of Chile and sent them to the bottom with the loss of all hands.  So the Royal Navy dispatched two of its original battlecruisers, Invincible and Inflexible, to deal with Spee.  On December 8, 1914, they caught him making a run at the Falklands and in an afternoon’s shooting destroyed nearly his entire squadron (taking not only Spee but his two young sons down).

But o! what a difference a word can make!  Fisher permitted them to be called “battlecruisers,” and further permitted them to be regarded in the fleet as components of the battle fleet.  They were to be the fleets’ “scouts.”  But the fleet had scouts, you see.  It had shoals of destroyers and full squadrons of actual cruisers.  Ships that could out-run even a battlecruiser.  Since a scout’s whole mission is to get close enough to the enemy to figure out what’s going on (recall, Gentle Reader, that radar was still 20 years or more in the future), you don’t want a scout you can’t afford to lose.  Hard cheese on the expendable scouts, but there it is.  In short, the very worst place for a battlecruiser is in a fleet battle formation, where its speed is negated (it can’t maneuver faster than the slowest unit in the fleet), and where it will necessarily be exposed to heavy and concentrated shelling from the opposing fleet.  And that’s precisely where the British put theirs.

Without going into too great detail, Jellicoe managed to cross Scheer’s T not once, but twice that day.  With lousy visibility, poor communications (flag hoists were nearly useless and the day’s primitive radio sets tended to be knocked out the concussion of the ship’s own guns firing), and the press of fleets maneuvering at well over 20 knots each, Jellicoe managed one of the greatest sustained feats of seamanship in all naval history.  At a cost, a ferocious cost.  Full three of Britain’s deadly cats went down, each one the victim of a German shell finding its magazine.

In the below picture, somewhere at the bottom of that enormous cloud of smoke and flame, is what used to be HMS Queen Mary.

And here’s HMS Indefatigable going down:

And this is what is about to become the former HMS Invincible (the Royal Navy’s original battlecruiser):

And at the end of the day, after Scheer for the second time had ordered Gefechtskehrtwendung (“battle turn”) away from the Grand Fleet, to make a run for home, Jellicoe, true to his previously stated and endorsed intention, did not follow.  The public and to some extent the brass never forgave him.  He was booted upstairs and Admiral Beatty, who commanded the battlecruisers that day, was given command of the fleet.

The High Seas Fleet never came out again in force until it did so to surrender.  For all of Tirpitz’s brilliance as a political operative and administrator, he never successfully addressed the strategic conundrum facing the Imperial German Navy:  It was bottled up in the North Sea and unless it destroyed the British fleet — which no one thought it could do — there it was going to stay.  Meanwhile the British fleet enjoyed the freedom of the world’s seas, as did its enormous merchant fleet.  Until the advent of the submarine.  Mahan’s fleet-in-being theory could not exist, in short, without reference to the hard facts of geography.

What did the British learn from Jutland?  Not enough to avoid building HMS Hood as a battlecruiser, and not enough to pull her out of service once built to bulk up her armor.  And not enough not once again to use the wrong tools for the job, sending her to her doom against Bismarck in 1941.

Via a link at Althouse, I stumbled this morning across a 2006 interview transcript from an NPR broadcast.

The interview subject was the fellow who was publishing a biography of Upton Sinclair.  Most Americans (at one time) knew him as the author of The Jungle, his 1906 exposé novel of the Chicago meat-packing industry.  Whatever its purely literary merits (and they seem to have been patchy enough), it was enormously effective in getting America stirred up about what was on its plate.  Literally.  Sinclair was disappointed because as a socialist (he was in fact hired to write the book as a socialist tome, not a public-health pot-boiler) the parts of the book he was least interested in got the most public attention.  We’ve all heard how the book was instrumental in prompting introduction of a federally-mandated inspection regime, which generations of high school teachers have solemnly informed us was fought tooth-and-nail by “the industry.”  Except it wasn’t, at least not by the large operators.  Inspection regimes are fixed costs.  Large operators can spread those fixed costs over larger production, so the price-per-final-product is less.  Small operators have to recapture that cost over a smaller number of products with a correspondingly larger price increase.  The desired result, from the big boys’ perspective, is that their competition will be priced out of the market and new market entrants faced with a large barrier to successful entry.  And so it proved to be.  Whether meat inspection is a good thing or bad can be debated.  But what is interesting in retrospect is the extent to which Sinclair may have gilded the lily on the hygienic conditions in the industry.

So Sinclair, the socialist, had a track record of service to Larger Truths.  In 1927 two Italian immigrants, Sacco and Vanzetti, were executed for murder.  Ever since we’ve been told by all our well-meaning teachers how they were just two innocents, framed up because they were (i) immigrants; (ii) Italian; and, (iii) avowed anarchists.  So obviously the fix was in, wasn’t it?  That’s the premise that Sinclair took with him when he went to write his novel, Boston, about the case.  Sinclair’s later biographer thinks he was pretty fair in presenting the case and the evidence.  Notice how Mr. Biographer words his statement:  “I think he was fair in his representation of the evidence and the case.”  The evidence and the case are not the whole story.  Do remember, please, that trials, especially criminal trials, are highly artificial proceedings.  That’s intentionally so; giving effective meaning to the presumption of innocence requires it.  Anyone who expects “the truth” necessarily to come out in a trial is a gull who deserves to blow $4,800 on penis-enlargement surgery which goes wrong.

And as it turns out, Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty as hell, and their lawyer presented a fraudulent defense.  Let’s hear it from Sinclair himself, as related in a letter from 1929:  “Alone in a hotel room with Fred [the defense attorney], I begged him to tell me the full truth. He then told me that the men were guilty and he told me in every detail how he had framed a set of alibis for them.”  Did he disclose that?  Well no, no he didn’t.  At least he had the common decency to admit, privately, where his duty lay:  “I face the most difficult ethical problem of my life.”  And how did he resolve that “most difficult ethical problem”?  Well, being the good lefty, he went out and served that good ol’ Larger Truth.

From his biographer:  “I think he felt that the climate of opinion and the representation of their foreignness, they were Italian, and their political beliefs, which were anarchism, had almost condemned them out of hand before they had a chance at a fair trial. . . .  Even if the men were guilty, he felt that the larger context of the world in which they were living rendered their guilt perhaps less important than it might have been otherwise.”  Ummm.  Fair trial?  No, they did not have a fair trial.  They got to put on a fraudulent defense.  Their lawyer lied to the jury.  A “fair trial” does not mean “the defense wins.”  And somehow their guilt was “less important” because they were anarchists?  No, it was even more important precisely because they were anarchists.  Recall in the 1920s there was tremendous debate going on about the fundamental nature of all these (later revealed as monstrous) political movements which had welled to the surface of post-Great War Western society and were tearing European societies to pieces.  The lefties here assured us that all of us troglodyte Americans were just too hard on those folks.  They only wanted Justice for the Common Man; they were for Peace (sort of like our left-extremists nowadays keep proclaiming the Religion of Peace, and refusing to call outfits like Boko Haram what they are: bloodthirsty terrorists, even when pressed to do so by their own colleagues in government).  In the Sacco and Vanzetti case America got to see what these thugs were really all about.  So it was critically important that the correct verdict be reached precisely because it ripped the mask off.  And as it turns out, notwithstanding they were lied to, the jury got it right.

Then come the Rosenbergs, Julius and Ethel.  Rivers of tears were shed for those poor innocents, done to death by a bunch of red-baiters.  Except that Julius definitely was, and Ethel may well have been, guilty as sin.

Fast forward to the Chambers and Hiss ruckus.  For decades the left extremists swore up and down that Alger Hiss was simon-pure and no more than the victim of a witch hunt.  Except he wasn’t.  He was guilty as sin.

And then we come to Tailgunner Joe, a distasteful person by any means, and a drunk, and a mountebank.  When Eisenhower, whom General Marshall had made (it was Marshall who promoted Ike directly from Lt. Colonel to Brigadier General; it was Marshall who tapped him to command TORCH; it was Marshall who handed him OVERLORD, even though he dearly wanted it for himself (Marshall had never commanded troops in battle, and he knew this would be his last chance) and even knowing that the commander of the invasion could easily have the presidency, if he wanted it) stood on a podium and listened, in silence, as McCarthy slandered Marshall as a traitor, Truman so lost respect for Eisenhower that he would never thereafter speak his name in public.  In Plain Speaking he refers to “that fellow who followed me.”

McCarthy famously brandished his list of however many hundred people who were communist infiltrators.  No one ever saw any such list, of course, and it’s undeniable that the 1950s Red Scare tarnished many people, ruined their careers even.  On the other hand, since publication of the VENONA files (Wikipedia has a list of American names appearing in the decrypts; some of them are breath-taking, and that’s not even a complete list: more are known), it’s likewise undeniable that McCarthy was dead-on right about the degree to which senior government positions had been infiltrated by the Soviet Union.  Alger Hiss was just one of many.  Hollywood still moans about its black-listed performers, producers, and others.  On the other hand the Soviet Union in fact did make a concerted effort to subvert American popular culture.  Their most effective and lasting capture, still loyally defending his blood-soaked master decades after the facts were known, was Pete Seeger (on whom more here, from his former extremely close friend, Ron Radosh).

I could go on.  I could trot out the new left-extremist notion of “fake but true” (which fits under the rubric of “dialectics”).  I could observe that the closest that Hollywood’s got to the Katyn massacres is a tangential reference in “Enigma.”  But why go on?

The common thread in all of those is that to the left, facts just do not matter.  What must be served is the Higher Truth, or what today’s left-extremists call the “narrative.”  It’s what was at the heart of Journolist, the news-manipulation cabal run from The Washington Post and whose mission was to elect Dear Leader.  I cannot and so do not deny that there are those on the Right for whom inconvenient facts get deep-sixed.  I am unaware, though, that the air-brushing of history is formally a part of Rightist philosophy and is not only engaged in on an organized basis but is actually an approved method.  Where is the right-wing Saul Alinsky, after all?

I suppose I really ought to give up on one of my favorite expressions:  You can’t make this stuff up.  You most certainly can, and we’ve got an entire chunk of the American political spectrum that regularly does.  Because that’s what its doctrine tells it to do.  Gentle Reader might study on that.

Forewarning: This is something of a stream-of-consciousness post, and thus an experiment. Whether it was a successful experiment I will leave to whomever stumbles across this.

The other day I was chatting with someone of my acquaintance who happens to be an Episcopal priest, and much enjoys theology. By “theology” I mean the formalized thinking – principally Christian, of course – about the nature of godhead, our relationship with God both as individuals and as members of the different overlapping and intersecting societal spheres we inhabit, and so forth. Given that Jesus was an observant Jew, of course, Jewish theology both at the time and as since developed provides not only a backdrop but also an important substantive cross-check and interpretive tool for pondering the Mysteries as revealed through the teachings of Jesus and the Church Fathers. 

[Aside: I must here confess that I am a bit leery of taking “theology” at least in its modern manifestation too seriously. It is on the one hand undeniably true that we live in a radically different world than the one in which Jesus moved and taught, and that we modern humans have utterly different relationships with many of the circumstances of our existence than did the people who flocked to hear Jesus (or Paul or any of the others) teach. Since “circumstances of our existence” includes each other – in fact you might make a very compelling argument that we are each other’s principal circumstances of existence and our relationships with each other define our existence, at least on a moral plane – that suggests also that the bonds between and among the people who heard Jesus teach and in the context of which they understood Him are of mixed utility in discerning the answer to The Great Big Question: How do I live my life in the world I confront now? Of course the response to that is that Jesus, being of one Substance with the Father, would have known all that before a word left His mouth, and would have taught the people accordingly. 

More importantly and on the other hand, and this is where I cannot avoid the niggling suspicion that way too many “theologians” are getting off the path, Jesus did not come to preach to the post-doctoral students. The people He taught were to a man, nearly, illiterate. They were dirt poor, hungry, and eaten alive with vermin, parasites, and pathogens. Huge numbers of them would have lived in what we today would describe as filth, their own and their animals’. As Mark Twain noted during his travels in the Holy Land, Jesus chose the most immediate and effective message he could have, among that people: He healed their sick. They also practiced slavery (and in jubilee years freed their slaves and forgave their debtors). Given the standards of medical care in antiquity and the reasonably foreseeable rate of death in childbirth, their domestic habits would likely not pass modern muster either. I’ll guarantee that, of the groom, bride’s parents, and others at the wedding feast where Jesus first manifested His divinity by performing His first miracle, nowadays the groom would be on his way to prison for at least statutory rape (and maybe rape of a child, if she was at the youngest end of the marriageable age spectrum) and the parents would be headed the same way for conspiracy and contributing. And does anyone want to bet how many people at that feast were 21 years of age or older and still managed to drink the wine casks dry? 

All of that is just to make a very simple point: Jesus was teaching to simple people whose understanding and ability to take His teaching and apply it in their own daily lives were extremely limited. Even though people back then spent what we today would consider a phenomenal amount of time and energy actively pondering and discussing theology, you can’t get away from the fact that these were not Learned People. All these modern esoteric doctrines of this-that-and-the-other, the mountains of what can only with charity be described as academic gibberish the principal aim of which seems to be the “proof” that practicing Christianity must necessarily dictate support for the farthest-left wing of the farthest-left parties, including political support for the most murderous and humanity-destroying philosophies ever devised by the mind of corrupted man and unqualified support for the legally-unfettered right to kill one’s unborn baby, and the rest of it really smacks as being presumptuous. Likewise even more outrageous is the suggestion that unless you can navigate the tomes of modern “theology” you can’t claim to understand Christianity in its essentials or details and therefore you should please shut up and do as you are told by the Deep Thinkers Who Understand Things Better Than You. Remind me again of how this differs from the insistence on keeping the Gospels available exclusively in a language not even spoken by an illiterate peasant mass. Jesus may have instructed His apostles to go forth and make disciples of all the world’s peoples, but that was only because He wasn’t going to keep mooning about the place. While Jesus walked among men, He taught directly to the lowest and meanest of the world’s poor. I cannot accept that He would have chosen to preach to them a message that they were unable to comprehend sufficiently to, as He invited, “Come and follow me.”] 

Having now unburdened myself of that little screed, I proceed on to my post. 

My interlocutor was discussing a funeral sermon to be delivered this Sunday. The subject of remembrance came up. As it was told to me, in Jewish understanding so long as any remains alive who can “call your name” (as we say out in the country), you are still a part of a living community of believers. That much seems reasonable and I’ll have to take it on faith, being personally unfamiliar with the nuances and so forth. Also brought up was the mythology of Isis and Osiris. They were brother and sister and also husband and wife (talk about ancient domestic arrangements, but then King Tut really was the product of just such an incestuous union). Osiris managed to offend the wrong sort of god, who slaughtered him and scattered his pieces up and down a long valley. Isis went looking for the pieces, weeping and lamenting; her tears formed the Nile. She found them all, it seems, except his . . . ahem . . . manhood, which seems to have come to grief in a marsh or something of that nature and been eaten by an animal. She put them back together and, being herself a goddess, managed to bring him back to life long enough to impregnate her (how that happened without . . . oh well, I suppose when you’re both gods you can arrange such things). In any event, the story was told in the context of reading the word “remembering” as “re-membering,” the re-assembly of fragments. 

While I’m not sure that’s sound etymology (Mr. Webster does not back the proposition), thinking about “remembering” in that manner does seem to make a bit of sense. For starts, our experiences of each other are necessarily fragmentary, even of those closest to us. Our recollective powers are likewise patchy and subject to the ravages of space and time. When one dies to us, all we have left are these piece-work glimpses, some fading, some remaining acutely vivid. In our re-membering the departed one, we re-assemble that person into a living presence, in the sense of a presence capable of offering joy, sorrow, hurt, hope, laughter, comfort, and all the other essentially human interactions. True enough: these interactions are no longer with a live human organism, but then the sensations which remain are no less real. When we communally “re-member” a person we gain not only just the number of points of recollection but also we restore, somewhat, the multi-dimensional character that person displayed while alive. What makes a diamond sparkle is not its surface but its depth. No one is the same person to everyone. Each of us, even if experiencing the same character attribute of a person, experiences that person as expressed in that attribute differently. 

Contemplation of these little snippets leads me to contemplate a subject that presents itself to me from time to time. The simple fact is that almost no one I know, at least not in my close circle of acquaintance — those in whose most immediate presence I spend my life — is interested in certain of the things which absolutely fascinate me. I know enough to accept that circumstance not as an indictment of anyone – why ought anyone find interesting what I do, after all? – but rather as a fundamental set of relationships with the world I move in. Well, perhaps a better way of stating that would be a lack of a set of relationships. Other people have their own interests, worries, hopes, and dreams, and it is unreasonable to expect them to respond the same way to the things which intrigue me. So over the years I’ve learned to enjoy what I enjoy and accept that I will likely never share the joy of it with anyone, or at least not face-to-face. Which is a pity, but the world is full of much greater pities. 

One of the sets of things which fascinates me is history in general, and the specifically human experiences that collectively make up “history.” Having a head which seems unfortunately suited to the retention of masses of trivial detail, it is packed solid (pun intended) with exactly that sort of detail. The names, dates, occurrences, and parallels to the world I know crowd around me. I can lose myself for long periods contemplating what the world looked like to the monks who first staffed up Cluny. I find intriguing pondering the sweep of a particular family, from the Habichtsburg above a tiny Swiss village in the 12^th Century to the burial of Archduke Otto in Vienna in July, 2010. My home county is criss-crossed with the remains of old country roads. You can see them traced across open fields, a double line of trees about ten or twelve feet apart (trees don’t naturally grow like that, you know). I see them and instantly I’m transported back to 1910 or sometime, wondering what it must have felt like to be driving a horse-drawn farm wagon down one of those roads, lurching from hole to rock and back. What it must have sounded like, smelled like. Around here you can till up the ground for a garden and depending on where on the hill you’re working be pretty certain of digging up numerous fragments of arrow heads, spear heads, chippers, scrapers, and similar traces of long-ago camps. What were they talking about around that campfire as this chip was struck from the edge of this arrow head? Had the hunt been good that day? Could they have, perhaps in some religious trance or other halluncinatory interlude, have had the slightest inkling of Us, centuries later, stumbling across their hunting camp? A number of years ago I was in a museum in Freiburg, the Augustinermuseum. Among their exhibits are ecclesiastical carvings and so forth from around that area. One of them was an altar crucifix that had been carved sometime in the 1100s. I am unqualified to speak of the artistic merits of it, but what gripped me was the thought of all the thousands of people from that village and the surrounding farms who would have sat in front of that figure over the course of centuries. Through the Black Death; through the Reformation and the Peasants’ War; through the Thirty Years War and Napoleon’s invasions; through all manner of other wars, tumults, robber barons, famines, and festivals. Who were they? What were their worlds like, for them? 

I also and especially enjoy reading books written about then-current events. The author of course doesn’t know how the story ends; he cannot fully know which aspects of what he’s looking at may be Truly Significant. One such book that immediately comes to mind is Strong Man Rules, which went to press no later than June 29, 1934. The author was a professor at Hunter College, and the book is about this new political regime that’s just coming into focus, in Germany. It’s about who’s in, who’s out, who owes whom what favors, and so forth. Among the Rising Men (other than the Chancellor, of course) is mentioned Ernst Röhm, who is, the author opines, certain to be heard from further. Which is how I know the absolute latest date on which that book was turned over to the printers. But the whole thing is the author has no idea how the story ends. The crematoria, the thousands of starving prisoners, the corpse-filled trenches all across Eastern Europe, the embers of tens of thousands of houses, and the stink of the bodies buried beneath . . . those things would not, could not have occurred to him. Kristallnacht? What’s that supposed to be? 

And so on. 

I won’t say that such things and people are somehow “real” to me. In most cases I don’t – can’t – even know their names, or even when they might have existed, and my efforts to re-awaken by the feeble powers of my imagination are . . . well, feeble. I do know that they did exist, however, and in thinking about them and their world – the things they saw, heard, smelled, knew, and the things they couldn’t have known but I now do, just by having come along a matter of several decades or centuries later – I get the sensation of having them become a part of me, of how I greet the world. And by that feeble process of re-awakening them and their world it is as if, in some nebulous way, I am living not only today, the January of 2014, but all prior days, and all at once. Part of me thinks I can get on that road, now overgrown between its rows of bordering trees, and Go Where They Went. I can look at that crucifix and hear the sermons. I can re-create the sensation of not knowing, as the Duke of Wellington described it, what is on the other side of that hill. 

For me, it’s as though I get to live in all worlds up to now, and each day just adds to the pile. I don’t have to turn loose of anything that ever was; I can still hear the buzz of insects outside that village church door on an August afternoon. Wasn’t it Faulkner who said that around here, the past really isn’t even past? The old boy might have been on to something.