"T. H. White - The Once and Future King" - читать интересную книгу автора (White T.H)

Sisters, mothers, grandmothers: everything was rooted in the past! Actions of any sort in one generation
might have incalculable consequences in another, so that merely to sneeze was a pebble thrown into a
pond, whose circles might lap the furthest shores. It seemed as if the only hope was not to act at all, to
draw no swords for anything, to hold oneself still, like a pebble not thrown. But that would be hateful.
What was Right, what was Wrong? What distinguished Doing from Not Doing? If I were to have my
time again, the old King thought, I would bury myself in a monastery, for fear of a Doing which might
lead to woe.
The blessing of forgetfulness: that was the first essential. If everything one did, or which one's fathers
had done, was an endless sequence of Doings doomed to break forth bloodily, then the past must be
obliterated and a new start made. Man must be ready to say: Yes, since Cain there has been injustice, but
we can only set the misery right if we accept a status quo. Lands have been robbed, men slain, nations
humiliated. Let us now start fresh without remembrance, rather than live forward and backward at the
same time. We cannot build the future by avenging the past. Let us sit down as brothers, and accept the
Peace of God.
Unfortunately men did say this, in each successive war. They were always saying that the present one
was to be the last, and afterwards there was to be a heaven. They were always to rebuild such a new
world as never was seen. When
the time came, however, they were too stupid. They were like children crying out that they would build a
houseтАФbut, when it came to building, they had not the practical ability. They did not know the way to
choose the right materials.
The old man's thoughts went laboriously. They were leading him nowhere: they doubled back on
thelmselves and ran the same course twice: yet he was so accustomed to them that he could not stop. He
entered another circle.
Perhaps the great cause of war was possession, as John Batt the communist had said. "The matters gothe
nat well to passe in Englonde," he had stated, "nor shall nat do tyll every thyng be common, and that
there be no villayns nor gentylmen." Perhaps wars were fought because people said my kingdom, my
wife, my lover, my possessions. This was what he and Lancelot aad all of them had always held behind
their thoughts. Perhaps, so long as people tried to possess things separately from each other, even honour
and souls, there would be wars for ever. The hungry wolf would always attack the fat reindeer, the poor
man would rob the banker, the serf would make revolutions against the higher class, and the lack-penny
nation would fight the rich. Perhaps wars only happened between those who had and those who had not.

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As against this, you were forced to place the fact that nobody could define the state of "having." A
knight with a silver suit of armour would immediately call himself a have-not, if he met a knight with a
golden one.
But, he thought, assume for a moment that "having," however it is defined, might be the crux of the
problem.
I have, and Mordred has not. He protested to himself in contradiction: it is not fair to put it like that, as if
Mordred or I were the movers of the storm. For indeed, we are nothing but figureheads to complex
forces which seem to be under a kind of impulse. It is as if there was an impulse in the fabric of society.
Mordred is urged along ahnost helplessly now, by numbers of people too many to count: people who
believe in John Ball, hoping to gain power over their fellow men by asserting that all are equal, or
people who see in any upheaval a chance to advance their own might. It seems to come from
underneath. Ball's men and Mordred's are the under-dogs seeking to rise, or the knights who were not
leaders of the Round Table and therefore hated it, or the poor who would be rich, or the powerless
seeking to gain power. And my men, for whom I am no more than a standard or a talisman, are the