I don’t read the TLS regularly but tend to buy it when the NYT is not available. There was a letter in the recent Letters section about The ruins of Ypres – What did Tommy read?
[The article] explores the books which the average soldier may or may not have read in the trenches. But there were also books in the memory. One of the most touching stories is retold by Frank Laurence Lucas in his edition of Webster’s Duchess of Malfi. In a note to the famous echo scene in the ruined abbey he adds the following from Robert Ross’s Reality and Truly: a book of literary confessions (1915):
“In some trenches near Ypres, there was quartered a sulky young Scotchman of my acquaintance. For many weeks he had not exchanged a word with any of his brother officers beyond what the exigencies of the trenches demanded. One early morning, moved by the silhouette of the battered city against the coming dawn, he murmured half aloud to himself Antonio’s line in The Duchess of Malfi.
I do love these ancient ruins:
We never tread upon them, but we set
Our foot upon some reverend history
….A young Englishman near him immediately took up the quotation with the end of the speech –
Churches and cities, which have diseases like to men
Must have like death that we have.”They became great friends. A common interest in literature achieved that which the terrible realities of warfare had failed to bring about.
Of course I know none of the works that they refer to. But I just love the words and the nested references.
I am “moved by the silhouette of the battered [world] against the coming dawn”, and that’s the early hours when I read. By the time I get up, my left brain is racing away and I work on my mad neuroscience project in the (metaphorical) shed. By lunchtime I’m almost all spent but after a nap I push myself through the TODO list of emails. Late afternoon, my right brain starts to function. I play the piano. I read the newspaper and LRB. By 5 pm I start to wind down and find a quieter self, listen to some music, text and phone people, and write (like now, 20:50).