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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
British writers on peace and war
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Hilaire Belloc
From Permanence
In times of grave public anxiety, after the tempest and destruction of universal war, after the expectation of further destruction and tempest, it is of high value to consider permanence, or what may be called the “Permanency of Impermanence”. It is not only a consolation but a strength; a strength through the contemplation of a great reality and a steadfast truth. For though you may not affirm of any one thing in the mortal world that it is permanent, yet you may affirm of Permanency itself that it is permanent. You may repeat to yourself with confidence that the principle of permanence underlies all vicissitude.
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[The] recurrent ritual of man and the earth will go its way at last, after we know not what aeons of time. Yet there is about the aspect of such things, the fields and their fruits, the procession of the hours and the seasons, of the days and the works of the days, something that makes them not so much an example of mortality as a mirror of permanence; and I would have any man whom our times have overwrought seek his nourishment again among those peasants who have thus, since men first dwelt together under laws and worshipped the divine, formed one with the land they till. To such a scene would I come back when the return of peace itself permits the journey…
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