I am slowing down, not so conscious of time, which recently has been not so much as pressing as beckoning ... now I feel time can wait. What happens, happens. Nothing can now stop what will or will not eventuate. Everything lies in the decisions we make. I live quietly and now that that part of my life is over, for now anyway, I feel as if I have dropped some baggage from my mind. Yes, I leave out many things that matter, and I dissemble on the subject of my inner life because it is in such a fluid state. When I write about it I do so as though it has set fast, even for a moment, in some way. But what is my real purpose? I cannot avoid the show of emotion or personal feeling and if I try to explain the circumstance that led to my decision, what would they think! Perhaps these thoughts are beneficial for my inner life. There seems to be a metaphorical confusion in this: if the inner life is in need or air, how come it takes place in the least excessible part of my being? Perhaps there are clues here to the nature of humaness? There may be clues, but the mystery to myself is insoluable as ever!

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.

I remain doubtful as to whether we have fully developed a mechanism of working together. The UN has become a council of a few who direct or merely aid others, as they think wise or to suit their own self interests. We have yet to set up the joint-machinery to deal with the multiple problems that accompany our every forward step and I suspect we will find ourselves moving from one expediency to another, sowing the seeds of future discontents - racial, religious and political. I also attach an interesting article with some further comments from ‘Quandrant’ - July/August - p37 “World out of balance” which I think you’ll find of interest.

As I once said before, your comments are often an enjoyable tour through the quotations of Plato, Aristotle and Freud and I find your own viewpoints vivid and fascinating. Your sense of history and military experience stands you in good stead. I am often ignorant of, or uninformative about, the complexity of what is happening in the world today - it is always hard to place recent events in a proper perspective and you open my mind not only to what is happening today but to the challenges that lie ahead. I guess as you say we cannot afford the luxury of self-imposed blinkers! I truly believe ... “Freedom is, in truth, a sacred thing. But then what is virtue if not free choice of what is good?” ....

Yes, we have to have courage and stamina in this chaotic changing world. How can we elevate reason above ignorance, myth, bigotry and hate? It's all so wrong, the brutality, the lust for power, the stark injustices inflicted upon the innocent. So much is soured by resentment and loathing. It's such a sad terrible thing, isn't it? Because the consequences of it go on and the finality ... echoes. I have no answer to monstrous and calculated evil. Human life can call forth such horror. The world has become steadily a more, not less, violent place. Must every page in history be written in blood? Passions grow swiftly when doused in a rich rain of blood in the furnace of war.

What thoughts have I? Oh, God! Elusiveness becomes clogged by the stupidity of human nature. If we teeter on the brink long enough, eventually we're bound to fall in. History accumulates disasters and how quickly we forget. I suspect you are writing of the irrelevance of the world, where men squabble and boast and tyrannise. I was intrigued by the world view behind your comments. I am not myself exactly complacent about our modern industrial civilisation. We practice excess, excess in everything. It is a hard world as you say, but will it ever become less hard? The awful indulgences of society change from era to era. If mankind was indestructively good, the world would be a better place. We have only a vague conception of the horror and devastation of war. Emotions boil up which can so easily wreck a city, a country, a world and I am haunted by what is happening today. I think it is easy to forget how violently mankind can react. No one can live on hatred alone. Love and hate walk hand in hand. I doubt whether we can fully experience the one without knowing the other or that one flaring brightly, will not engender its counterpart as inevitably as the sun casts shadows.

The world continues to fall apart, its social fabric is in tatters, its eco-system near collapse. I have come to know and fear so much through the pictures. I wish every person could experience one day and night of the pictures. They would open unseeing and uncaring eyes and tightly closed minds. Nothing is permanent, everything changes. The world beyond is specious and temporary. Anyone with their eyes open can see the dangers that lie ahead. Critics abstain from saying or writing what would make an enemy or wreck a sacred scheme? We are forced into ambiguity, or, in pursuit of some collective advantage, silence. Look at what is happening in the USA today. McCarthyism has returned and people are being hounded.

You tell me it's no good being pure and agnostic and that you doubt an enemy would drop his arms and embrace our way of thinking. You also write of justice. All justice is partial. One knows the rules, one applies the rules, but one applies them according to secret bias. You draw an insidious parallel. For my part, I long ago became content to live along with my feelings and judgements, but I recognise that life shifts as desires are contained and released and that situations do not remain stable. You have written of faith, but faith is something through which justice prevails and evil perishes and from which miracles might be expected.

I watch what is happening in the word and I ask myself why we live our live shut in by walls? Reality stands before us, yet we fails to see it, because what we see is the mirror image of our expectations and they blind us to the truth and keep us chained to the past. I am not sure if I could ever come to terms with man’s utter ruthlessness and apparent amorality. I look at the world and ask myself what is it we really want? What do we want to achieve? Questions I confront, but always in the front of my mind is the pain of the future. What brushes against my mind, what does my mind see from the distance of time?

So many things that are happening in the world today which are evil and wrong. The face of evil can wear many masks even of kindness and mercy and love when needed. Its deceptions are more twisted than can be imagined. The amount of misery being inflicted has now become a part life. The rage of America is born of unreasoning fear; a fear that was born in the past but is real, but it will never be complete and their aims can never be achieved because they exist in a world, which is fixed in the past. They have created what they live from their impressions of the past and they will continually create an evil that they will not be able to control. There is much destruction in the future, which cannot be amended because the past contains the shadow of darkness as it does today and in the future. It will become a never-ending circle to re- emerge, no matter whatever happens today. The most real things are not often what we think they are. Real things are an illusion, as Plato said ‘real life lies below the surface, or above the surface of all things, unseen apart from glimpses.’ Yes, people should know more not only of the past but the future. People must know what should never become reality yet how can one make them see? What have I become but a researcher of absurdities?