Mar
27th
Thu
27th
Wasn’t it noticeable at the end of the (First World) war that men who returned from the battlefield had grown silent - not richer but poorer in communicable experience? What poured out in the flood of war books ten years later was anything but experience that can be shared orally… A generation that had gone to school on horsedrawn streetcars now stood under the open sky in a landscape where nothing remained unchanged but the clouds and, beneath those clouds, in a force field of destructive torrents and explosions, the tiny, fragile human body.
— Walter Benjamin, The Storyteller.