A Hundred Unchildlike Lullabies
bookforum.com
bookforum.com
Learn what? I always wondered. No-one ever told us. Not once I can ever recall.
As I stopped being a kid I started to form my own view that said "lessons" were how monstrous things can be. We forget those lessons. I see people never understanding them because they've grown up in a peaceful society in a peaceful family. What they're used to defines how things are to them, and, so terribly mistakenly, how things will always be.
These kinds of guys (it's usually guys) who say "life's a bitch and then you die", and I so want to slap their stupid, comfortable faces off.
My brothers and I had a... childhood, let's say. We won't make that mistake; we know life isn't intrinsically safe because it never was. Every day we pay for that, and that's how it is. But compared to these horrors, none of us could complain.
"She remembers as an authentic miracle a dog that followed her home at some point deep into the nine-hundred-day siege and saved her family from almost certain death. She has been asking the dog’s forgiveness ever since."
"a twelve-year-old boy remembers using frozen German corpses as sleds"
And plenty more just in that extract.
We were taught the worthless shit in history, the date of gallipoli, details of hitler's beer-hall putsch, and surely that was right, I don't think many children can face the ugliest reality of war without getting mangled, but this awfulness needs to be be learnt at some time so people understand things can collapse into utter hellishness, and the only thing stopping it is, perhaps, themselves. It's not another's responsibility, it is one's own. I've come to understand history does matter because history is a warning, if you care to listen.
History—in the oldest meaning of "making a study of history"—isn't one of the liberal arts. It was never studied for its own sake. The study of history wasn't something like Latin or Mathematics that the nobility of old thought would "expand the mind"; instead, it was a very practical thing—the study of the history of state and the history of war, usually by those aiming to become strategists and run new states or wage new wars.
Seen through this lens, the "lessons" of history are pretty obvious ones: they're the strategic mistakes made by those monarchs and diplomats and generals and spies of the past, the ones that got them killed or their countries sundered.
Sadly, in the opinion of seemingly every society throughout, well, history, nobody but those who would put these lessons to immediate, practical use has need of learning them; and those who don't need them are seen as being better off left unexposed to them.
How many here believe that someone's hair can turn white in one day?
Well I guess if it's so important it must deserve an answer.
The mechanism I've heard is some people have salt-and-pepper hair, that is a mix of dark and white hairs. The dark ones can be affected by stress and fall out more easily.
A littel googling and here you go, <https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/09/canities-....
As I've answered your question, perhaps you won't mind answering mine; what did you make of the rest of the article?