Excerpt from Inter Arma: Being Essays Written in Time of War
It is probable that when the terrific storm, which is now blowing through almost every country of the world, has subsided, and when we experience the full results of a cataclysm so unparalleled, the movement of the European mind during the war may become a subject of philosophic curiosity. On August 1, 1914, we were wakened out of an opiate dream of prosperity and peace, a dream in which the images of life recurred as on a kind of zoetrope, with a lulling uniformity of repetition. So it was, so it had been, so it would ever be, the only possible change being that everybody must grow richer, that life must become more luxurious, and that the orb of moral and intellectual experience must wheel ever more and more hugely around a secure and radiant society. And then, with a stage suddenness, Berlin unmasked itself, and the self-sufficiency of Europe was shattered.
Between our old sleepy quietude and the inconceivable and immeasurable novelties which await the world when all this chaos is harmonised again there lies a period of storm, a sort of belt or stratum, dividing the life we knew from the life which we cannot yet so much as conjecture.
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