I had intended for my first entry to delve into some of the
details about the recording of the new album, Luck In This Life,
in Berlin last summer. However, we posted the new site just days
after war broke out in Iraq. Since then, like many folks around
me, I've been wracked with an uneasy ambivalence about the
reasons, rationalizations, results and ramifications of that
war. I was struggling with ways to expresss that ambivalence
when I came across this passage from Ernest Hemingway's A
FAREWELL TO ARMS. I think this sums it up rather neatly for me:
"I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and
sacrifice and the expression in vain. we had heard them,
sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that
only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on
proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other
proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing
sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the
sacrifices were like the stockyards in Chicago if nothing was
done with the meat except to bury it. There were so many words
that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of
places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and
certain dates and these with the names of places you could say
and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory,
honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names
of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the
numbers of regiments and the dates."
--Ernest Hemingway
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