Alive

Monday, January 6th., Comarques, Thorpe-le-Soken.

Whilst out walking this morning I suddenly realised that I felt remarkably 'alive'. I was on a low ridge with open countryside on both sides. There was a stiff breeze, not cold exactly but very present to the skin. I had been walking for about 30 minutes and it came into my head that I was walking briskly but without effort, striding along; no aches or pains; clear head. I had to stop and just breathe in deeply, and feel delighted with the world and with myself. A great feeling which I haven't had many times in life, at least not since childhood.

I am deeply engaged in promoting the work of the Wounded Allies Relief Committee of which I am a member. I have written a promotional pamphlet which is being widely distributed. The main focus at the moment is a high-class concert I am getting up in aid of the Committee's funds to take place at the Haymarket Theatre on February 20th. The Committee has enterprises in all Allied countries and spends about £100 a day, every day. The money needs getting and there are no days off. Being wounded is just as disastrous and needs just as much sympathy now as at the start of the war, but the public gets tired, hence the requirement for continuous fund-raising activity.

I have just finished reading "Blood Meridian" by Cormac Mc Carthy. It is like no other book I have ever read and I am inclined to think that I wish to read no other like it. It is set in the American south-west mid nineteenth century and insofar as it has a 'story' at all is about a young man (a boy really) who runs from home and becomes involved in a sort of private army hunting, killing and scalping Indians in Mexico and the borders. The violence is continual and graphic, and enacted by all parties. There are no innocents in this tale. It has the feel of some sort of epic in the tradition of Homer or Beowulf or Norse sagas. Mc Carthy's descriptions of the terrain, the weather and the terrible purpose of this group of misfits left me shaking my head in wonder. I don't know where he derived his imagery from but his landscapes (human and natural) have a genuinely nightmare quality. The characters (including 'the kid' whose name we never discover) are grotesque but of little significance in themselves, apart from Holden, 'the judge'. I think McCarthy must intend the reader to take Holden as a sort of representative of Man as he has become: intelligent, well-read, curious, philosophical, capable of kindness, duplicitous, arrogant, cruel, violent and self-serving. At the end it is inferred that he kills 'the kid'. I don't know what to make of that.