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Bess Peebles Fox letters to her daughter, 1943-1945
1944-06-24 Stephen H. Bush to Helen Fox Page 1
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I send this to your mother to include her in our thoughts & greetings. I suppose she is as usual tremendous in gardening flowering and all her other activities. June 24, 1944 Dear Helen - I know what it means to you to live in the center of the effort of millions of men. Afterwards when you return to common living and again wake up in the morning with the thought - what will I, that is I for myself alone, will do today, there comes a strange new devastation of the soul. To go from being a part of the whole world to again living only an individual is as strange and difficult a change of gear as to pass from being an individual to being instead a living part of a world. I was so absorbed in 1918 that the shock after the Armistice was terrible. It was only when I saw the low palm fringed shores of Egypt in 1921 that I was able to draw a free breath and realised that I was once more back in a world that I could live in. The experience was an agony and as always I never went back to the self-centered career-centered university centered life that I had known. I was unprepared totally, for any difficulties and perhaps my speaking of this now may help. Leaving home, marriage parenthood earning your living for the first time, the coming of old age are similar shocks which often daze and paralyze people. Often they don't recover
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I send this to your mother to include her in our thoughts & greetings. I suppose she is as usual tremendous in gardening flowering and all her other activities. June 24, 1944 Dear Helen - I know what it means to you to live in the center of the effort of millions of men. Afterwards when you return to common living and again wake up in the morning with the thought - what will I, that is I for myself alone, will do today, there comes a strange new devastation of the soul. To go from being a part of the whole world to again living only an individual is as strange and difficult a change of gear as to pass from being an individual to being instead a living part of a world. I was so absorbed in 1918 that the shock after the Armistice was terrible. It was only when I saw the low palm fringed shores of Egypt in 1921 that I was able to draw a free breath and realised that I was once more back in a world that I could live in. The experience was an agony and as always I never went back to the self-centered career-centered university centered life that I had known. I was unprepared totally, for any difficulties and perhaps my speaking of this now may help. Leaving home, marriage parenthood earning your living for the first time, the coming of old age are similar shocks which often daze and paralyze people. Often they don't recover
World War II Diaries and Letters
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