Claude Rowberry, London Blitz—Interior of a Ruined House. Royal Air Force Museum, Hendon, UK
“Be not deceived: evil communications corrupt good manners.”—1 Cor. 15:33 (KJV)
Thaïs, a celebrated courtesan in Antiquity
got Great Alexander to burn down Persepolis
it’s said—revenge of some sort, who knows?
And we fear Persians with nuclear weapons!
“When children begin to play, they don't eat,”
Anna Freud observed at her nursery school.
“The pleasure's greater than the wish to eat.”*
These children were, of course, not starving—
Passing a bombed house on a walk, a child said, “Naughty, naughty!”†
For him, things broken in the Luftwaffe’s Blitz
or in a boyish game were much the same.
To break things is the great temptation,
as we begin to grasp in this our nation.
Lives had been shattered in that city.
For these the breakers felt scant pity.
* Anna Freud, “Children’s Lunches, with trays,” report, Freud Museum, London, cited in Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Anna Freud: A Biography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 224. Quotations edited.
† Young-Bruehl, Anna Freud, 212.
Epigraph: As Milton noted in his preface to Samson Agonistes, "Of that sort of Dramatic Poem which is call'd Tragedy," Saint Paul is here quoting Euripides (perhaps by way of Menander’s lost playThaïs). Paul is considered the patron saint of the city of London.
Ash Wednesday, March 5, 2025
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