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

knights who were leadersтАФthe rich defending their possessions, the powerful unready to let it slip. It is a
meeting of the Haves and Have-Nots in force, an insane clash between bodies of men, not between
leaders. But let that pass. Assume the vague idea that war is due to "having" in general. In that case the
proper thing would be to refuse to have at all. Such, as Rochester had sometimes pointed out, was the
advice of God. There had been the rich man who was threatened with the needle's eye, and there had
been the money changers. That was why the Church could not interfere too much in the sad affairs of the
world, so Rochester said, because the nations and the classes and the individuals were always crying out
"Mine, mine," where the Church was instructed to say "Ours."
If this were true, then it would not be a question only of sharing property, as such. It would be a question
of sharing everythingтАФeven thoughts, feelings, lives. God had told people that they would have to cease
to live as individuals. They would have to go into the force of life, like a drop falling into a river. God
had said that it was only the men who could give up their jealous selves, their futile individualities of
happiness and sorrow, who would die peacefully and enter the ring. He that would save his life was
asked to lose it.
Yet there was something in the old white head which could not accept the godly view. Obviously you
might cure a cancer of the womb by not having a womb in the first place. Sweeping and drastic remedies
could cut out anythingтАФand life with the cut. Ideal advice, which nobody was built to follow, was no
advice at all. Advising heaven to earth was useless.


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Another worn-out circle spun before him. Perhaps war was due to fear: to fear of reliability. Unless there
was truth, and unless people told the truth, there was always danger in everything outside the individual.
You told the truth to yourself, but you had no surety for your neighbour. This uncertainty must end by
making the neighbour a menace. Such, at any rate, would have been Lancelot's explanation of the war.
He had been used to say that man's most vital possession was his Word. Poor Lance, he had broken his
own word: all the same, there had been few men with such a good one.
Perhaps wars happened because nations had no confidence in the Word. They were frightened, and so
they fought. Nations were like peopleтАФthey had feelings of inferiority, or of superiority, or of revenge,
or of fear. It was right to personify nations.
Suspicion and fear: possessiveness and greed: resentment for ancestral wrong: all these seemed to be a
part of it. Yet they were not the solution. He could not see the real solution. He was too old and tired and
miserable to think constructively. He was only a man who had meant well, who had been spurred along
that course of thinking by an eccentric necromancer with a weakness for humanity. Justice had been his
last attemptтАФto do nothing which was not just. But it had ended in failure. To do at all had proved too
difficult. He was done himself.
Arthur proved that he was not quite done, by lifting his bead. There was something invincible in his
heart, a tincture of grandness in simplicity. He sat upright and reached for the iron bell.
"Page," he said, as the small boy trotted in, knuckling his eyes.
"My lord."
The King looked at him. Even in his own extremity he was able to notice others, especially if they were
fresh or decent. When he had comforted the broken Gawaine in his tent, he had been the one who was
more in need of comfort.
"My poor child," he said. "You ought to be in bed."
He observed the boy with a strained, thread-bare attention. It was long since he had seen youth's
innocence and certainty.
"Look," he said, "will you take this note to the bishop? Don't wake him if he is asleep."