From Them Might Not
Almost Anybody Reproduce For Himself The Life Of That Time In Vicksburg?
Could You, Who Did Not Experience It, Come Nearer To Reproducing It To
The Imagination Of Another Non-Participant Than Could A Vicksburger Who
Did Experience It?
It seems impossible; and yet there are reasons why
it might not really be.
When one makes his first voyage in a ship, it
is an experience which multitudinously bristles with striking novelties;
novelties which are in such sharp contrast with all this person's former
experiences that they take a seemingly deathless grip upon his
imagination and memory. By tongue or pen he can make a landsman live
that strange and stirring voyage over with him; make him see it all and
feel it all. But if he wait? If he make ten voyages in succession - what
then? Why, the thing has lost color, snap, surprise; and has become
commonplace. The man would have nothing to tell that would quicken a
landsman's pulse.
Years ago, I talked with a couple of the Vicksburg non-combatants - a man
and his wife. Left to tell their story in their own way, those people
told it without fire, almost without interest.
A week of their wonderful life there would have made their tongues
eloquent for ever perhaps; but they had six weeks of it, and that wore
the novelty all out; they got used to being bomb-shelled out of home and
into the ground; the matter became commonplace. After that, the
possibility of their ever being startlingly interesting in their talks
about it was gone.
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