An elegy. Two generations. Growing up, before and after the Second World War.
I drop questions as coins into the wishing well of the past.
There are so many things I need to know but never will. There are so many questions I dare not ask. The more I search for truth, the more I am convinced I will find a lie. It is too late to begin again. It always is. I must make do with what I have and my memory provides but a poor and patchy record of what went before. Too many times, we remember only what we would like to forget.
Lest we forget. The legend on a thousand memorials, each a monument to transient remembrance. The Glorious Dead, gone and forgotten.
When we cannot remember, we no longer care. As rats fleeing fire, we hurl ourselves headlong from pasts we would rather forget. We scuttle into a desolate future, each racing the other to an oblivion utter in its completeness. And when we are gone, we are gone.
* The first four of thirteen chapters are here - The novel is complete *