I’m grateful to live in a day when thinking in black and white terms is becoming less and less acceptable. Issues are complicated. Life is complicated. People recognize it now more than ever. It seems to me that since 9/11 my fellow citizens and I are more aware, more concerned about how and why things happen the way they do.
I don’t know history well, but I want to learn. I’m reading a 1980 book called
The End of Order: Versailles 1919, by Charles Mee Jr. about the Treaty after WWI. What a mess that war and that treaty were! They set the tone for the violent 20th century.
These photographs say a lot.
One is a photo of the Hall of Mirrors at the Versailles palace in color (I visited there as a student back in 1975, but the photo is not mine). Though decadent and gaudy for my taste, it has its own beauty. Prisms bounce around the room from the chandeliers. Rainbows of color.
The second is a black and white shot of the men who signed the Versailles Treaty in 1919 in the same Hall of Mirrors, including our Woodrow Wilson. All men, all black and white. They each had their biases, set ways of looking at the world’s problems, which led to more disaster.
Mee writes:
“By January of 1919, as the delegates gathered in Paris for the Peace Conference, the shallow graves of Verdun were being washed out by the rains; feet stuck out of the ground, and helmets with skulls in them rose up through the mud. In this atmosphere, the diplomats gathered—and, far from restoring order to the world, they took the chaos of the Great War, and, through vengefulness and inadvertence, impotence and design, they sealed it as the permanent condition of our century.”
(original color photo at college.hmco.com/.../ image185_large.html)
