Sunday, February 20, 2005
Necessary evils this world has no lack of.
It's going to be on tv tonight at 10 (and I'm likely to miss it since I'll be at a class reunion dinner). Even watching the trailer alone, I felt the warm burning tinge in my eyes, ack but nostalgia. I had cried watching it then. It has been coupla years since I last watched the movie wit D when it first hit the big screens, and I still firmly believe this is one of cinema's greatest masterpieces. It brings us into a war (civil or otherwise) without the need for a real war it so fittingly narrates, that destroys lives, young men and their futures.
In desperation, these men become heros of situations. But who would want to be heros at the cost of such, who rather be common men without the burdens of such that weigh down the conscience and sleepless nights, I suppose. No soldier, I feel, can ever recover fully from the wounds of war, emotional ever more so than the physical. No person should be made to endure through a war. Things change, perspectives hit ground zero, emotions stripped raw as everything returns to the basic fundamentals - survival. All that I'm saying now is probably an understatement in the face of dire reality those brave men have had to go through.
From Wilfred Owen's Dulce et decorum est:
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.*
* "It is sweet and meet (fitting) to die for one's country."
It's going to be on tv tonight at 10 (and I'm likely to miss it since I'll be at a class reunion dinner). Even watching the trailer alone, I felt the warm burning tinge in my eyes, ack but nostalgia. I had cried watching it then. It has been coupla years since I last watched the movie wit D when it first hit the big screens, and I still firmly believe this is one of cinema's greatest masterpieces. It brings us into a war (civil or otherwise) without the need for a real war it so fittingly narrates, that destroys lives, young men and their futures.
In desperation, these men become heros of situations. But who would want to be heros at the cost of such, who rather be common men without the burdens of such that weigh down the conscience and sleepless nights, I suppose. No soldier, I feel, can ever recover fully from the wounds of war, emotional ever more so than the physical. No person should be made to endure through a war. Things change, perspectives hit ground zero, emotions stripped raw as everything returns to the basic fundamentals - survival. All that I'm saying now is probably an understatement in the face of dire reality those brave men have had to go through.
From Wilfred Owen's Dulce et decorum est:
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.*
* "It is sweet and meet (fitting) to die for one's country."
