I read your comments and I appreciate your support. Your words eased my mind. Previously, as Ive told you, I’m coping and surviving. But old memories, old fears stir ruefully.

Am I of so little faith, you ask, that I spend life running scared? Yes, I’m scared - I stand alone – the memories are in my mind. I am the one who suffers. I am the one who has to cling to sanity. How can I not be anxious and scared? I am afraid of the past especially because of what is happening today. There are times when I just want to hide away, go-off somewhere but I can’t so I have to live and face up to them. I yearn sometimes for moments of quietness when my mind does not recall. Am I being foolish, as you’ve indicated? Even when my rational mind knows that it’s wrong to hold a fixed, negative image of what occurred, I frequently find that I’m carrying around a lot of inappropriate baggage. The past is a burden; a burden I’ve accepted but it brings me little pleasure and its weight sits heavily upon me.

I’ve settled fully into my life here and built a happiness that precludes the darkness of the past but still it is there always in my mind. It dulls me. It is as if a shadow hangs there, just out of range that slowly extends as the years pass. It lurks hidden but yet present, invisible to all – unseen and unheard, only present to myself. So it goes on, idyll and menace. The days blend one into another. Time seemingly moving forward unconcerned with the events of the morrow. Responsibility, burdens, fun, days, better days, worse days, days of action and more philosophical days – it all comes together.

I recognise that the memories are a paean to the past. Memories whirl inside my head, bits of remembered faces and colours, sights and smells and I recall distant shores, of people I have known and left behind. Some are dead of course, but something still binds me to that time, to what took place, even after all these years; I am still a part of it. It's strange how one's past never really releases its hold; it always remains in a phrase, a remembered sight, sound or smell - a sharp aching feeling even after all these years. Nothing can alter what happened; the scar will always remain, deep and ragged in my soul.

I've spent so much time reliving and working over events of the past that I'm no longer sure what might have happened and what I have imagined as happened! I also know that the past cannot hurt me but what has happened recently seems to bring forth indistinguishable ordeals of fog bound horror. It lives on in my imagination, a vivid, terrifying nightmare of images. Save for the awfulness of certain memories I am coping better, perhaps because I have become psychologically tuned by past experiences to deal with their ogres. I also begin to see clearly how my experiences have clung close to the outer edges of my life for many years.

I’ve laboured long and hard to wall off that part of my life. Some of the wall is still sealed, cutting off, blocking off the dark places where I fear to look. At times the brick wall trembles as if something is pushing against it and I fight off a cold wave of nameless fears, scared that once this wall tumbles, the doors in my mind will fly open. I tell myself there is nothing to fear and that I am cursed with too vivid an imagination. My thoughts are irrational, stupid, childish. But something bothers me, something terrible. Something I don't want to think about. I keep close to my chest the memories like a deck of cards. Everything has changed as I have changed but I'm left with the knowledge that at any given instant, the security and hope of my life could fall away. Occasionally, in my dreams the wall appears. I work on the wall, I lay the mortar smooth and thick, each row of bricks solid and even to hide the doors behind. Sometimes in my dream the wall begins to crack and there is no escape and I have to work harder and harder to put the bricks back in place, to keep out the horrors that lurk behind those doors. The wall in my dream never seems complete and I wake, after the dream tired and exhausted.

Yes, the secret remains locked within myself, a secret kept within a signed document, just another classified secret among the many hidden in the vaults. Such secrets will be revealed, but not in my lifetime and even if it did appear, the secret itself would become a lie, deniable to all. The truth hidden whichever way you look at it. The cardboard men would make sure of that. As I am, denied and deniable alone and lonely with memories.

Yes, events of that time are impervious to rational explanation and I'm left only with the same razor-sharp memory or experience. Certainly there are sizeable gaps in my comprehension, mysteries both inside my head and out that remain unilluminated, but that only makes me the more determined not to succumb to any sentiment or self-delusion that would give those mysteries power over me. I experience a chaos of feelings all unsettling and in a sense familiar, as though they've been inside of me for years biding their time behind a screen of pragmatism I’ve established to keep them out of sight. Fear, I know is a poison, a taste in my mouth I live with. Such fears are a daily reality forever echoing deep within. I tread my way with cautious steps to avoid a sudden slide into that time. I've become closed and isolated even though I am living in the midst of a loving family – I shore up that wall behind which lie the horrors of the past – the fear of what occurred, the deaths that will forever haunt the memory. I hide from the known. The only way to survive. The guilt remains. But the greater reality, and the one I resist in my fearfulness and limitation is that it will resurrect itself and that the darkness of that time will encroach on the present. One of the harsh truths I have learned about fear is that no one can accompany you through it. A fear so easily triggered – nothing but a spectre of the past, which can so easily find itself in the present. I understand this fear so well, the limitations it places upon me. The sleepless nights, the beating heart, the ache in the pit of the stomach, the uncontrollable shakes. It is nothing but a memory held within … as long as it remains steady, then it can be lived with, even used to spur action. I won't break under it.

It comes down to a choice between two evils and one has to ask, “which is the greater”? On the one hand it is immoral to fight, to become a part and the cause of death and destruction; on the other hand, it is a greater moral wrong to ignore what is happening. I have come to the conclusion that bad as such action is, it is sometimes far worse if we do nothing.

May be a lot of life is shaped by the above kind of choices. Often we have to choose between evils, always hoping that we choose the lesser one. It’s a high price to pay, but the alternative of ignoring what is happening, by not becoming involved, by shutting our eyes to the fact that there are degrees of evil, some worse than others, is abandonment of everything that is good because we allow the greater evil to win. Such moral issues are complex. Often, unbeknownst, we do the wrong thing believing it is right. I’ve come to understand that life will never be clean and clear cut and that there is often no choice between black and white and that the choice lies too many times within the grey area. It makes me anguished to think of the choices that are open to us. I guess no-one likes to face the fact that sometimes an immoral act is the only right thing to be done and that the world is not what it seems, it is not just black and white!

I believe there are no limits for man in the world. He can see forever and he will achieve more than can ever be believe and yet while he will create, the darkness that hides in every man will destroy and matters of the spirit will be pushed aside in his rush to achieve. His learning will continue to be hard and deadly. There is something ignoble about mankind. Such an ugly notion, but I fear man's savagery and greed and his capacity to abuse. When you read Euripides, Menander and Theophrastus, Sophocles and Oedipus one realises how little mankind has changed in the intervening years. Human problems are complex but all the trouble in the world is human trouble. All the cruel and malicious indifference confronted has a human face and soul. We are at best indifferent and at worst wantonly cruel. We are all still savages at heart.

I am fascinated with this world of ours and watch its events with some interest. I often ask myself – why is it we never learn from past mistakes? Is it because our lives are of such short duration, or is it because we deliberately shut our minds from what we know?