Abandon hope all ye who enter here

[Aragorn ll Elessar]

The Soldier, by Rupert Brooke

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England’s, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by the suns of home.
And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

[Aragorn ll Elessar]

A Dead Boche, by Robert Graves

To you who’d read my songs of War
And only hear of blood and fame,
I’ll say** (you’ve heard it said before)
”War’s Hell!” and if you doubt the same,
Today I found in Mametz Wood
A certain cure for lust of blood:
Where, propped against a shattered trunk,
In a great mess of things unclean,
Sat a dead Boche; he scowled and stunk
With clothes and face a sodden green,
Big-bellied, spectacled, crop-haired,
Dribbling black blood from nose and beard.

[Aragorn ll Elessar]

The Cenotaph, by Charlotte Mew

Not yet will those measureless fields be green again
Where only yesterday the wild sweet blood of wonderful youth was shed;
There is a grave whose earth must hold too long, too deep a stain,
Though for ever over it we may speak as proudly as we may tread.
But here, where the watchers by lonely hearths from the thrust of an inward sword have more slowly bled,
We shall build the Cenotaph: Victory, winged, with Peace, winged too, at the column's head.
And over the stairway, at the foot - oh! here, leave desolate, passionate hands to spread
Violets, roses, and laurel with the small sweet twinkling country things
Speaking so wistfully of other Springs
From the little gardens of little places where son or sweetheart was born and bred.
In splendid sleep, with a thousand brothers
To lovers - to mothers
Here, too, lies he:
Under the purple, the green, the red,
It is all young life: it must break some women's hearts to see
Such a brave, gay coverlet to such a bed!
Only, when all is done and said,
God is not mocked and neither are the dead.
For this will stand in our Market-place -
Who'll sell, who'll buy
(Will you or I
Lie each to each with the better grace)?
While looking into every busy whore's and huckster's face
As they drive their bargains, is the Face
Of God: and some young, piteous, murdered face.

[Aragorn ll Elessar]

To Germany, by Charles Hamilton Sorley

You are blind like us. Your hurt no man designed,
And no man claimed the conquest of your land.
But gropers both through fields of thought confined
We stumble and we do not understand.
You only saw your future bigly planned,
And we, the tapering paths of our own mind,
And in each others dearest ways we stand,
And hiss and hate. And the blind fight the blind.

When it is peace, then we may view again
With new won eyes each other's truer form
And wonder. Grown more loving kind and warm
We'll grasp firm hands and laugh at the old pain,
When it is peace. But until peace, the storm,
The darkness and the thunder and the rain.

[Aragorn ll Elessar]

Break of Day in the Trenches, by Isaac Rosenberg

The darkness crumbles away.
It is the same old druid Time as ever,
Only a live thing leaps my hand,
A queer sardonic rat,
As I pull the parapet’s poppy
To stick behind my ear.
Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew
Your cosmopolitan sympathies.
Now you have touched this English hand
You will do the same to a German
Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure
To cross the sleeping green between.
It seems you inwardly grin as you pass
Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes,
Less chanced than you for life,
Bonds to the whims of murder,
Sprawled in the bowels of the earth,
The torn fields of France.
What do you see in our eyes
At the shrieking iron and flame
Hurled through still heavens?
What quaver — what heart aghast?
Poppies whose roots are in man’s veins
Drop, and are ever dropping;
But mine in my ear is safe —
Just a little white with the dust.

[Aragorn ll Elessar]

Here dead we lie, by A. E. Housman

Here dead we lie
Because we did not choose
To live and shame the land
From which we sprung.

Life, to be sure, 
Is nothing much to lose,
But young men think it is,
And we were young.

[Aragorn ll Elessar]

And There Was a Great Calm

BY THOMAS HARDY
(On the Signing of the Armistice, 11 Nov. 1918)

I

There had been years of Passion—scorching, cold,
And much Despair, and Anger heaving high,
Care whitely watching, Sorrows manifold,
Among the young, among the weak and old,
And the pensive Spirit of Pity whispered, “Why?”

II

Men had not paused to answer. Foes distraught
Pierced the thinned peoples in a brute-like blindness,
Philosophies that sages long had taught,
And Selflessness, were as an unknown thought,
And “Hell!” and “Shell!” were yapped at Lovingkindness.

III

The feeble folk at home had grown full-used
To 'dug-outs', 'snipers', 'Huns', from the war-adept
In the mornings heard, and at evetides perused;
To day-dreamt men in millions, when they mused—
To nightmare-men in millions when they slept.

IV

Waking to wish existence timeless, null,
Sirius they watched above where armies fell;
He seemed to check his flapping when, in the lull
Of night a boom came thencewise, like the dull
Plunge of a stone dropped into some deep well.

V

So, when old hopes that earth was bettering slowly
Were dead and damned, there sounded 'War is done!'
One morrow. Said the bereft, and meek, and lowly,
'Will men some day be given to grace? yea, wholly,
And in good sooth, as our dreams used to run?'

VI

Breathless they paused. Out there men raised their glance
To where had stood those poplars lank and lopped,
As they had raised it through the four years’ dance
Of Death in the now familiar flats of France;
And murmured, 'Strange, this! How? All firing stopped?'

VII

Aye; all was hushed. The about-to-fire fired not,
The aimed-at moved away in trance-lipped song.
One checkless regiment slung a clinching shot
And turned. The Spirit of Irony smirked out, 'What?
Spoil peradventures woven of Rage and Wrong?'

VIII

Thenceforth no flying fires inflamed the gray,
No hurtlings shook the dewdrop from the thorn,
No moan perplexed the mute bird on the spray;
Worn horses mused: 'We are not whipped to-day;'
No weft-winged engines blurred the moon’s thin horn.

IX

Calm fell. From Heaven distilled a clemency;
There was peace on earth, and silence in the sky;
Some could, some could not, shake off misery:
The Sinister Spirit sneered: 'It had to be!'
And again the Spirit of Pity whispered, 'Why?'

[Aragorn ll Elessar]

Emilie Sagee, the ubiquitous teacher
In the middle of the XIXth Century, in Livonia (Lettonia), between Riga and Volmar, there is a college for noble young ladies which is called the Pensionnat Neuwelcke.  The boarders belong to the greatest Livonian families, and the Director, Mr Buch, flatters himself that he has in his establishment, among others, the second daughter of Baron Guldenstubbe, the charming and very intelligent Julie, aged thirteen.
In 1845, Mr Buch engages a French teacher, Mademoiselle Emilie Sagee.  She is a pretty Bourguignonne, born in Dijon, blonde with light eyes and an amiable character.  She is thirty-two.  Intelligent, cultured, she soon conquers the Director’s estime, her colleagues’ friendship and her pupils’ affection.
Strange rumours, however, run through the pensionnat about the new teacher.  In fact, several times, certain pupils have noticed that they disagree on an apparently insignificant detail:  the place where they have just met Mlle Sagee.  When one says that she has seen her in one part of the establishment, it is frequent that another assures having met her elsewhere at the same moment.
At first, the pupils believe that they are mistaken.  But as it continues to occur, they finish by finding the thing very strange.  To the point that they decide to speak about it to the other mistresses.
One morning, a delegation goes to find the Arithmetic teacher and tells her that they are sure that Mlle Sagee is a strange person, because she is sometimes in two different places at the same time…
The teacher bursts out laughing, shrugs her shoulders and declares that she has never heard anything quite so stupid, that these young ladies are really too imaginative and that they are making it all up…  After which, she sends the girls back to their studies…
But the anomalies in the French teacher’s comportment soon take on a character which excludes all possibility of error or fantasy.
One day when Mlle Sagee is giving a lesson to thirteen of her pupils, and is writing a sentence on the blackboard, the girls are suddenly very frightened to see two Mademoiselle Sagees one beside the other.
Riveted to their benches, they notice with growing stupor that, while the two people who are writing at the blackboard look exactly alike and are making the same gestures, only the real Emilie Sagee, a piece of chalk in her hand, is effectively writing.  Her double, with empty hand, is only imitating the movements that she is making while tracing the words.
This story is immediately spread, and causes a sensation among the other boarders.  The Director, informed of a strange incident which is supposed to have occurred during a French lesson, interrogates Mlle Sagee’s pupils.  But even though all of them, without exception, affirm having seen the second form and are perfectly in agreement on the description that they make of the phenomenon, Mr Buch, too, shrugs his shoulders…  He tells them that their story is foolish, that they were dreaming…  Perhaps they had been a bit tired at that particular moment.  There, there, we’ll say no more about it!
The pupils leave his study very disappointed about not succeeding in convincing him, for they are sure of their facts:  they really saw Mlle Sagee divide into two.
A little while later, a second incident comes to trouble the pensionnat.  It unfolds in a bedroom where a pupil, Antoinette de Vrangel, is dressing to go with a few friends to a local festival.  Mlle Sagee has come to help her, and is hooking up the back of her dress.  Suddenly, the young girl looks over her shoulder and sees two Emilie Sagees taking care of her.  She is so frightened that she faints.
This time, Mr Buch is worried.  He asks hinself if his boarders have not all gone mad.  He makes enquiries and learns with fearful astonishment that the pensionnat‘s domestics, too, have seen the French teacher split into two.  These peasant women explain to him that, from time to time, in the refectory, they see Mlle Sagee’s double standing behind her chair, while she is eating.  This double, they say, imitates all of her movements, but “without knife or fork, or food in its hands”…
Mr Buch is very troubled.  He becomes even more so a few days later when some teachers come to tell him, horrified, that they now believe in the ubiquity for they, too, have seen Mlle Sagee divide into two before their eyes…
And the phenomena continue.
The witnesses then notice that there can also be variations.  In certain cases, the double doesn’t imitate the movements of the real person.  It has a sort of existence of its own.  For example, it is seen to remain seated when Mlle Sagee rises.  Sometimes, the double’s independence is even clearer.  One evening, the French teacher is in bed with a heavy cold.  Antoinette de Vrangel has come to read to her to relieve her boredom.  Suddenly, she sees her pale and stiffen as if she is about to faint.  Frightened, she asks the teacher if she is feeling worse.  Mlle Sagee weakly denies it.
A few minutes later, the boarder happens to look over her shoulder and distinctly sees the patient’s double walking back and forth in the room…
But here is the most remarkable case of the apparently independent activity of Mlle Sagee’s two forms.  One day, the pupils of the pensionnat, all forty-two of them, are gathered in the sewing room.  It is a big room on the ground floor with four windows opening onto the garden.
The boarders are all seated around a long table and, through the open windows, they can see Mlle Sagee who is picking flowers along a garden path.
At the end of the table, a supervisor is sitting in a green leather armchair.  At one moment, this lady leaves.  However, her armchair does not remain empty very long for the young girls suddenly see Mlle Sagee’s form appear in it.  They immediately turn their gazes toward the garden and see their French teacher still busy picking her bouquet;  but her movements seem to be slower and heavier than a while ago, like those of someone who is very tired.
They turn their eyes to the armchair again.  The double is there, silent, motionless, but with such an appearance of reality that, if they hadn’t just seen Mlle Sagee in the garden, they could think that she is there in person.
However, they all know that it is the double, and they are now so used to this strange phenomenon that two of them rise, approach the armchair and, trembling a little, touch the apparition.
The whole class watches them, frightened, and Mlle de Vrangel asks them what it feels like.  They answer that it feels like a piece of muslin or crepe material.
And, now feeling very audacious, one of them dares to pass right up against the armchair, thereby traversing part of the form.  When she returns to her place, she is livid…
The double then gradually disappears and the pupils notice that Mlle Sagee, in the garden, is now gathering her flowers with her usual vivacity.
These phenomena last for months, to Mr Buch’s despair.  He fears that this strange comportment might damage his establishment’s reputation.
His fears are justified.  Many parents, informed of what is happening, remove their children.  After eighteen months, there are only twelve pupils left out of forty-two.  Mr Buch is then obliged to fire his French teacher – for ubiquity…
The story of Emilie Sagee is known to us through the people who saw her.  Mr Buch’s pensionnat received only young ladies of the nobility.  Having become elderly ladies, some of them wrote their souvenirs, as was often done at the time, in this society.  And one of them, Baroness de Guldenstubbe, the little Julie that Mr Buch was so proud of having in his establishment, wrote so many things about Emilie Sagee in her souvenirs, that the English writer and philosopher, Robert Dale Owen, wanted to meet her.  The Baroness furnished many details to the writer about the duality of the French teacher.  Details that he reported in one of his books which bears the very beautiful title Sounds of Footsteps at the Frontiers of Another Life [Bruits de pas sur les frontieres d’une autre vie].
***
Collective hallucination has been mentioned.  However, before entering Mr Buch’s establishment, Mlle Sagee, who had started teaching at the age of sixteen, had passed through eighteen colleges…  eighteen colleges from which she had been fired because of her phenomena of bilocation…  It appears difficult to admit that the pupils, teachers and directors of eighteen establishments had suffered the same hallucinatory influence about the same person…
***
Mlle Sagee wrote nothing about her own case.  For the simple reason that she had nothing to say;  for at the moment of her divisions, she felt nothing.  She was absolutely unconscious of what was happening and – she has often repeated this – she only knew about the phenomenon because of the expression on the faces of the people who were there…  It was by seeing their frightened faces, their eyes staring at something invisible which seemed to be moving near her, that she understood…  But she had never, herself, seen her double;  neither had she noticed the stiffness and slowing down of her movements when her double appeared…
***
It was noted that the phenomenon took place when Mlle Sagee was very worried or very immersed in her work.  The double could also manifest itself in a place about which she was thinking.  For example, she has recounted that, on the day when she was picking flowers in the garden, glancing at the sewing room, she had seen the empty armchair and was saying to herself:
“The supervisor has gone, I’m sure that the young ladies will take advantage of it to gossip and waste time…”
And, as a teacher worried about discipline, she had thought:
“Ah!  If only I were there!”
And she was…
***
It is difficult to know whether or not Emilie Sagee’s double appeared far away from the pensionnat.  It could have, without being noticed.  At Neuwelcke, the pupils sometimes saw the double in the college itself, while Mlle Sagee – as everyone knew – had gone for a walk in the forest or in the neighbouring village…
***
There are other striking examples of ubiquity.  Among others, the case of Padre Pio, the Italian monk who died in 1968 and whose phenomena of bilocation were noted by hundreds of people, notably journalists…  But there are many, many others…
***
Parapsychological magazines periodically cite cases of bilocation.  And numerous researchers, among them Doctor Richet, Doctor Osty, Doctor Goodrich and above all Doctor William Barnard Johnson, who created at Reno in the United States of America, an Institute for the study of these phenomena, have published extremely troubling reports.  According to these documents, it seems that, most of the time, the double is only seen by other people;  but sometimes, it can also be seen by the subject himself (autoscopy).
***
It is, in fact, a sort of “phantom of a living person”.  But parapsychologists, who detest using the word “phantom”, and don’t like the word “ubiquity” because it belongs to theological vocabulary, give these phenomena the name of “bilocation” or “bicorporeity”.
***
For the moment, these wise parapsychologists emit no hypothesis to explain the facts.  They prudently content themselves with stating their existence with as much rigour as possible.  And they have already been able to obtain a few certitudes mentioned by Danielle Hemmert and Alex Roudene in their work L’Univers des fantomes.
“The positive attitude of the facts permit today to establish that the existence of the human phantom (of a living person) is objectively noted by concording witness reports, by photographs of the double accidentally obtained;  by the influence that this apparition produces simultaneously on humans and on animals;  by the effects exercised by the double on matter.”
***
We are therefore able to conclude that we are in the presence of a double acting, at certain moments and for inexplicable reasons, outside its physical envelope.
***
Most parapsychologists who have studied the problem think that this double is totally distinct from the soul and that it draws its substantiality from the body of which it is an emanation.  In short, as surprising and as mysterious as it might be in the present state of our knowledge, this phenomenon is probably quite natural…
***
After having left Mr Buch’s pensionnat, Mlle Sagee retired to the home of her sister-in-law, the mother of several children who very quickly grew used to the phenomenon to which the young woman was subjected.  They said:
“We have two Aunt Emilies!”…
For children accept all miracles…

[Gjest AthenaRavenLuna]

[Aragorn ll Elessar]

[Aragorn ll Elessar]

[Gjest AthenaRavenLuna]

[Gjest AthenaRavenLuna]

 

[Aragorn ll Elessar]

[Aragorn ll Elessar]

[Aragorn ll Elessar]

[Aragorn ll Elessar]

[Aragorn ll Elessar]

1

[Aragorn ll Elessar]

2

[Aragorn ll Elessar]

4