A few weeks ago I saw a news story of 'the last German and the last Englishman from WW1.' One of the men was 109 and the other 108! Then, just the other day, my eyes fell upon the visage of an Australian from that Great War. He was, what, 108! Forty-five years from now I will be 108, if I am still alive. Who will be on the list of recipients of my annual letter then, if I am still writing? Perhaps, if I live to such a ripe old age and I can then talk, not about WW1 as those old chaps I saw on the TV recently, but about the one referred to by one of the great master of the art of describing horror and defining its underpinnings--Henry Miller. He was not writing about guns and swords but about the horror on our times and the war we are all fighting, each in our individual ways. Miller was, as far as I know, one of the first to get away with using that "f" word in his trilogy: Sexus, Plexus and Nexus back in the 1950s and early 1960s. I was just finishing my baseball career at the time, trying to make it with girls and not very successfully....
Anyway, Miller wrote the following, and I think it was about 1941 or 1942,: "When the destruction brought about by the Second World War is complete, another set of destructions will set in. And it will be far more drastic, far more terrible, than the destruction which we are now witnessing. The whole planet will be in the throes of revolution. And the fires will rage until the very foundations of the present world crumble." Not a happy note--but very appropriate for the topic of horror and an interesting perspective on the subject--which I leave with readers to ponder.-Ron Price, Tasmania