"Beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and devil are fighting there, and the battlefield is the heart of man." Fyodor Doestoevsky (1821~1881)

Thus making veterans of us all. I came across this quotation in the course of my daily birthday check. It turns out that Fyodor Doestoevsky came into the world exactly ten years before Nat Turner left it by way of a noose provided by a bunch of furious white folks, terrified of what could happen should all of the enslaved rise up. Doestoevsky was born on what would have been Abigail Smith Adams' 77th birthday. John's 'dearest friend' [a valiant, gallant pair of veterans they were. don't need to put on a uniform after all to give your life to a nation] had left the building, had her ticket punched, back in 1818, about a 100 years before all the guns fell silent, all along the wretched, muddy, miserable & murderous Western Front, at the 11th hour, the 11th day, the 11th month. Geo. S. Patton, who turned 33 that day, who'd be no stranger to suffering in battle, would write that "it is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived."

I say it'd be foolish & wrong not to try to do both, not to remember.