Days of Infamy

The 8^th of December in the Catholic calendar is Immaculate Conception, a mystery of infinite density that non-Catholics would find allure in. Years and years ago, in 1941, this tremendous mystery, however, vanished with the skies filled by what were called then enemy planes.

That day was the beginning of the Second World War in our country.

Hours before that – the 7^th of December to be exact – Pearl Harbor in idyllic Hawaii was bombed. If we are to believe the narrative of the United States, the missive from Japan declaring war came minutes after the U.S. base in the Pacific was in shambles and ruins. There was treachery therefore and deceit of the highest evil order.

I am curious though: what was the world before this day in 1941. If we are to use the words of the ultimate conquistador, Napoleon, to him is attributed the quotation: "History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon." If we are to the chronicle of those days as their remembrance had been agreed upon, then we come upon a world that was on the verge of both glory and gore.

The year 1940 saw the rise of Carson McCullers and her first novel, “The Heart is a Lonely Hunter,” a story about outcasts and misfits. Richard Wright in his review states how “Miss McCullers' picture of loneliness, death, accident, insanity, fear, mob violence and terror is perhaps the most desolate that has so far come from the South.” The same critic writes of the style of this new voice and how she “recounts incidents of death and attitudes of stoicism in sentences whose neutrality makes Hemingway's terse prose seem warm and partisan by comparison.”

In that stoic prose, Hemingway would grace the 1940s with his “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” In the middle of World War, in 1943 when thousands were dying from bullets and lack of food, Hollywood would issue the film version of this novel in the tradition of extreme romance starring Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman.

Raymond Chandler releases his “Farewell my Lovely” during this year.  The other ominous farewell signs were there already: Germany initiates its conquest of certain territories, starting with Paris, Denmark and Norway. Italy declares war and even advances to southern France. Then Japan joins the Axis.

As the world, without its knowing it, bids to any notion of peace, somewhere in France, in the cave of Lascaux, prehistoric paintings are discovered. This cave art a testimony to the ancient desire of man and woman to control the universe through the magic of art and the power of the mind.

By 1941, Joe DiMaggio has set a new record in baseball. Germany marches on, to Greece and Yugoslavia. Germany also invades in 1941 the Soviet Union. Germany tries to reach Moscow but is repulsed by the violence of winter.

During this period, the German playwright, Bertolt Brecht, writes his play “Mother Courage and her Children,” a theater piece producing this line “War is like love, it always finds a way.” An example of the Epic Theater, the play is considered to be the greatest anti-war play for the 20^th century.

Love, unlike in the play, will lose its way during the year of 1941. Greta Garbo, considered to be the greatest actress and the most beautiful, retires already by this year, afraid, according to some source, to grow old before her fans. Living long after the war has ended, Garbo would be a recluse and thus retaining—in the memory of those who last saw her before Japan joined the war—the beauty of the face as it was in the year 1941.

The memory of war persists. Long after it has ended and even after the 8^th of December is observed in peace again by Catholics as the Feast of Immaculate Conception. Memory, however, is deceiving. Hemingway of 1941 would be our prophet with his novel the title of which is taken from John Donne’s Meditation No. 17 written in 1600, years and years before the infamy of 1941. Completing that line, we hear this: "No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."

In 1941, no one could ask for whom the bell tolls; it sadly for everyone tolled.