La Vie En Rose for 2005 August 11

Today is the 11th, so happy birthday to Ginny & happy anniversary to mom & dad.

Christina & I wanted to go to a French restaurant near here that got really good reviews on citysearch, and cast about for an excuse to celebrate. Our friendship anniversary had already passed, so we chose today. But when I looked it up today for a map, I noticed the hours and the fact that it's only open for dinner. Fab. So we went somewhere else, but it was still good. Stacy came along & we went to LUSH and I stocked up shampoo for the year (the solid ones last forever).

Generally I try to feel sympathy for the women I read about for work. But sometimes I have to try really hard. I was proud to tell Justin that Isabel Emslie Hutton was one of the first prominent women psychiatrists, and she was on the British Medical Association's committee to investigate Freud's teachings and pyschoanalysis. May Sinclair is just pyscho. She was a famous and sucessful novelist, yet she switched shamelessly between past and present tense, first and second person, sometimes within the sentence. She thought of the war as a grand adventure, a way to achieve exalted Reality with a capital R. A lot of women went to the front because they wanted an adventure, but also because they wanted to help; the horrible "Reality" of it sobered them up soon enough. May Sinclair... had a lust for danger, but not the stomach for it. She bemoaned the fact that she was not twenty years younger. The "very refinement of hell" was the fact that she was stuck in the village feeding refugees, not out on the field rescuing wounded from under fire. She was seemingly oblivious to the fact that the four thousand refugees, to whom she helped feed a daily ration of six slices of bread, had left their houses and were now sleeping cramped together on filthy straw in order to escape the same fire she longed to be under, and might have a different definition of the "refinement of hell." In fact the times she did go out with her ambulance she only got in the way. It disturbs me that someone in such close proximity to the horrors of the war should be able to imagine war a beautiful, wonderful thing--not for whatever ideals she thought these men were giving their lives to preserve, but because of the exileration it made her feel to be in what she percieved as danger, but was in fact, comparative safety... I suppose I ought not judge. I don't think, if I were in the same position, I would have thought or behaved the same, but I can't know, can I?