Global cities

Just finished reading Shadow Cities: A billion squatters, a new urban world. Robert Neuwirth. Focus on Rio, Nairobi, Mumbai and Istanbul.

More about this later.

11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month

Unlike most people of my age, I am unusually invested in the history and emotion of World War I, and especially in the impact of the losses. This preoccupation stems from a study trip called "The History and Geography of World War I" in 2001. It was life-changing in many respects, not least because of the amazing poetry and literature and memoir I read as background for my seminar paper.

This sonnet by Charles Hamilton Sorley is one of my favorite (although emotional) poems of all time:

When you see millions of the mouthless dead
Across your dreams in pale battalions go,
Say not soft things as other men have said,
That you'll remember. For you need not so.

Give them not praise. For, deaf, how should they know
It is not curses heaped on each gashed head?
Nor tears. Their blind eyes see not your tears flow.
Nor honour. It is easy to be dead.

Say only this, "They are dead." Then add thereto,
"Yet many a better one has died before."
Then, scanning all the o'ercrowded mass, should you
Perceive one face that you loved heretofore,

It is a spook. None wears the face you knew.
Great death has made all his for evermore.

Thanks to world-war-pictures.com for posting this so that I could grab it.