Order and Chaos: Dover Beach

Yes, thanks, so Tolstoy's War and Peace deals with the tension between plans and chaos in war. I never really read the whole War and Peace. maybe it is my time.

I am surprised at my interest in all this. It is perhaps the residue of my own career, where I sometimes looked face to face into uncertainty, chaos, unpredictability, the dark side of people determined to kill. It is the responsibility of the journalist to bring temporary, sometimes misleading order out of chaos. So much of "our" intellectual and emotional and even professonal life can be an attempt to bring order, predictability, coherent understanding to things which are inherently unknown, unpredictable, beyond our grasp.

Matthew Arnold caught it well.

Fred

Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach, 1867

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the A gaean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.


Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.