Rosa Darling…
Yesterday morning I went over to the library again instead
of trying to sleep. Sunday is the one bad day of the week for the graveyard
shift in operations and signal intel. The difficulty is partly
psychological—there is some envy for the men in the other branches who have the
day off. But most of the trouble is verbal.
Sunday is the one day everyone is not off at work and with men arguing
all day long about when the war will end and how many stripes a lieutenant
commander in the Navy wears and whether Shirley Temple is a virgin and kindred
weighty subjects, Morpheus is a mite shy.
Before going down I took the portable over to personnel so
as not to bother the guys who were still sleeping in the hut and typed out my
notes on the books I was taking back—“The Men Who Make News” and “Asylum.” I
will send carbons of the notes down under separate cover.
The library is separated from the ACS grounds by two ravines
and a hill. When I arrived here it was possible to cross both of the ravines on
snow bridges, but now only a few dirty patches of crusted snow remain. A
regular bridge crosses one of the streams, but the other is unspanned. This
leaves a choice of a long walk along the roads or a short one across the tundra
up a hill around the end of the ravine and downhill to the library. I love this
walk.
Tundra, or muskeg, is strange, springy stuff. It is covered with grass, about eight inches long, thick and yellow-green. A surprising variety of small green plants none more than four or five inches high, stick up through the grass, which lies flat against the humpy, water-soaked ground. Today there were about half a dozen small birds, grey-breasted and with brown and black backs, flitting around and singing in short bursts. They looked like streamlined sparrows, flew a little like the Danube flitters, and their songs were beautiful. At least they sounded beautiful, although it may just be that I haven’t heard a bird for so long. I don’t know what they eat, or where they go in the winter. They seem too small to fly south. And as for their current diet, I believe the sailor was right. There are not worms in the ground here. They would drown.
The wetness of the muskeg is unbelievable. Near the surface,
on a dry day, the ground is merely damp. But a few feet, even a few inches,
below the grass lies a mass of mud. Cutting across the fields today I came on a
series of slit trenches. They were all three-fourths filled with water.
The library is, as usual, almost deserted. The only other
occupants were the librarian, a quiet little fellow who does not like to read,
and two Negro sergeants, one studying the New York Times of six weeks ago and
the other bowed over “Hell on Ice.” The radio was playing a Firestone classical
music program you and I heard in the states, last February I believe, and it
was very quiet.
I took a long time in picking out a pair of books to replace
the two I returned. My choice finally fell on a novel by Maugham—a mystery book
of foreign spying based on Maugham’s experiences in the British intelligence
office in the last war, and another journalistic study called “The Comics and
Their Creators.” Still out from my last trip down are Quintella’s “A Latin
American Speaks” and Koestler’s “Darkness at Noon.”
The later is my current reading choice. I believe it is the first novel I have read since coming up here—except for Melville’s “Typee,” which I would just as soon forget. As such, it is something of a vacation, although far more serious reading than much of the nonfiction I’ve assimilated recently. The story deals with the Moscow trials. The hero, or rather, the protagonist, is an old revolutionist arrested as an obstructionist. The story is of his thoughts during his time in prison awaiting execution.
Koestler can write. He makes his tired, disillusioned old
revolutionary extremely believable. He makes his dialogues with his old friend
and untired revolutionary jailor believable in spite of the fact that they are
wrestling continually with the problems of ends and means. And he makes the
trials—there is no portrayal of the trials themselves in the story, only
references to them by the two chief characters—come to life and be no longer
abstractions but real terminations of real lives. Try reading it. I am sure
they have it, and Koestler’s later “Arrival and Departure” at the University
Rental Library.
The remarkable thing about the book is the understanding it
gives of a type of mind which has always baffled me: the mind of the
humanitarian revolutionary who for the sake of humanity countenances, or even
instigates, the slaughter of humans.
…
I’ve gone on so long about the books that I haven’t time to
tell you what a marvelous thing it was after coming back from the library and
taking a nine-hour nap to find beside my bed the letters Herm West had brought
down from the mess hall—four from you (two letters, two enclosures) one from
Dad, one from Nate Krems, and one from Bill Fett. I’ll talk to you about them
tomorrow.
All my love,
M
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