Joy and Sorrow

The Armistice that put an end to WW1 came into effect at 11am on the 11/11th.  The last soldier to die in WW1, lost his life at 10:59.  His patrol had come across a nest of German submachine guns protecting a town.  He defied orders, and put a bayonet on his gun and charged. The Germans knew about the Armistice and waved him back to no avail.  It was kill or be killed so they dealt with him.  What a waste.
I am on the home run of the book “A Hobbit, A Wardrobe and a Great War.”  It seems now every sentence is chock a block full of good stuff.  To me, it is incredibly well written.  I have borrowed it from the Library several times in a row, as it is not like a novel.  It seems stuff needs to be absorbed.
Right now he is talking about sorrow being mixed with joy.  Both “The Fellowship of the Ring” and “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” did not shy away from this fact.  It is a part of the human dilemma.  All of us experience it.  We would definitely prefer there be no sorrow, but that is just wishful thinking.
Apparently at the end of WW1 there was incredible disillusionment.  The thought at the time was mankind was heading for some sort of Utopia.  A heaven on earth.  The question at the time was “how could we?”  The destruction seemed so senseless, and the prevailing thought was mankind is better than that.  It sounds a lot like how I see things today.  To me, it explains the purges we saw.  Basically, get rid of anyone seen to stand in the way of the utopia we are creating.
Much of the writing after WW1 was infused with pessimism.  Thomas Hardy wrote “Some could, some could not, shake off misery; The Sinister Spirit sneered “it had to be!” And again the Spirit of Pity whispered, “Why?” (Capitals his).  The author writes “Despite the jubilation, the celebrations, the parties and parades marking the end of the First World War, a brutal silence fell over much of the world.  It was the stillness of souls anguished and bewildered by the carnage of the war.”
What Tolkien and Lewis wrote went against the spirit of the time.  Tolkien was accused of “medieval escapism.”  Yet how their writing differed was that both proposed an outside agency was needed.  We see the same thing now with our fixation on super heroes.
I guess what I am reading reinforces my beliefs. No matter how good I may try to be, I cannot save myself.  It is a fact, joy and sorrow will always be intermingled in every human’s life.  Things do not go as planned.  No matter what happens, the best I can do is acknowledge my inadequacy, and reach out to something there to assist.