I'm completely captivated by the PBS Documentary War. I blink and an hour has sped by with the power of an emotional bullet train. An hour immersed in total darkness but for the stories of the men and women who lived these moments in history. An hour the writer within tries to lure me to the project at hand, the guilt of an unfinished project with too many miles to go to begin counting, until I realize every tear I shed along with these people brings me one closer to a realism I chase with my own words.
How is it possible to ground something so outlandish, and some would say frivolous, an idea as time travel is with the same powerful context as the universal human emotions the men and women of this war did? The same notes of loyalty and patriotism and unyielding love and despair that translate into the fabric of our own lives? Does living through such an unprecidented time make everything into shades of gray in comparison? Is it ever possible for someone so far removed from anything as intense a human drama as war to ever give these emotions justice in words?
The veterans in this documentary are dying at a rate of close to one thousand per day. Some of the places they revisit, for our benefit, I can only imagine would surface at the tail end of a lifetime, looking back. An urgency to speak the intimate truth--the raw honesty within--before time steals it away. It is this honesty writers struggle to capture, the translation of human experience that makes every one of us the same. No boundaries. No lines. Just the truth.
1 comment:
Wow, deep stuff for sure. So this is what you've been doing when I'm asleep?
You're definitely in the same catacism as me, and that being we should've been born a century ago, when simple things and simple life made for a life of quality.
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