Introduction里某一段
In his memoirs of his postwar life; It was the Nightingale, Ford writes hauntingly of how civilization had been defamiliarized after the experience of the abyss:
***'No one could have come through that shattering experience and still view life and mankind with any normal vision. In those days you saw objects that the earlier mind labelled as houses. They had been used to seem cubic and solid permanences. But we had seen Plegsteert where it had been revealed that men's dwellings were thin shells that could be crushed as walnuts are crushed. Man and even beast ... all things that lived and moved and had volition and life might at any moment be resolved into a scarlet viscosity seeping into the earth of torn fields.'***
***'No one could have come through that shattering experience and still view life and mankind with any normal vision. In those days you saw objects that the earlier mind labelled as houses. They had been used to seem cubic and solid permanences. But we had seen Plegsteert where it had been revealed that men's dwellings were thin shells that could be crushed as walnuts are crushed. Man and even beast ... all things that lived and moved and had volition and life might at any moment be resolved into a scarlet viscosity seeping into the earth of torn fields.'***
