On...Reading?

Hello darlings! Sorry I missed yesterday to post. I seem to be doing that frequently this week. I don't know what the deal is with that except that I appear to be in some inexplicable funk that makes me feel sad and unwilling to post.

Yesterday, I finished reading Kieli, a manga about a girl who can see ghosts (which was surprisingly good). I highly recommend it. As a matter of fact, you should go to mangafox.com right now and find it. Do not be dissuaded by the first chapter. The first chapter sucks. But the rest is quite good.

I then asked for suggestions for new reading material and got a suggestion for "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas. I actually really enjoyed it. A plain-text version of the short story can be found here. I thought it was good, albeit depressing, because it's about a utopian world that can only be maintained by a sick and twisted practice. It came highly recommended as a friend's favorite short story of all time, and while I don't necessarily rate it that highly, I think it's a very decent read which you should check out.

Please keep reading,
Rachel Leigh

Dulce et Decorum Est Pro Patria Mori

For Christmas this year, my best friend gave me a copy of The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen. I reread some of it after my Comparative Government final. After reading through a few of the contained poems and the biographical introduction, I began thinking about Owen's writing and why he is one of my favorite poets of all time. This is what I got out of it:

What I like about Wilfred Owen's poetry is how real it is. People often find it depressing. Of course it's depressing. It's war poetry. War is depressing. People lose limbs. Bright, healthy, happy boys go off in search of courage and with dreams of glory. Many of them come home in body bags, if at all. Owen saw this long before the rest of the world. He was a fatality of the first World War, the so-called "Great War," and he saw that the war he fought was sad and disgusting. He commanded men, men he thought were brave, strong, and worthy of all the best things in the world, and watched them die. He watched as gas hit and he saw men's faces hanging "like a devil's sick of sin" as they hoped and waited for death. His poetry is beautiful and horrifying and disgusting and heart-wrenching and political.

I guess the biggest tragedy is that he died before the end. He found himself in the trenches in France and never lived to see the fruition of his growth. After so loudly opposing war and getting so close to peace, he just...died. He warned that death for one's country was neither sweet nor glorious, but he was both sweet and glorious, and his death was a tragic loss.

"Blood's dirt," he laughed, looking away
Far off to where his wound had bled
And almost merged forever into clay.
"The world is washing out its stains," he said.
"It doesn't like our cheeks so red:
Young blood's its great objection.
But when we're duly white-washed, being dead,
The race will bear Field-Marshal God's inspection."

--"Inspection" by Wilfred Owen