Antietam

Today is the anniversary of the battle of Antietam, September 17, 1862. I’ve previously described my first experience at the Antietam battlefield.

- end of initial entry -

James N. writes:

Your experience at the battlefield is similar to several I’ve had over the years. When I was 22 I spent some time bumming around Europe. At one point, I was in Inverness, Scotland and I took a bus ride to visit a museum of the 1745 rebellion against the Hanoverian kings. The bus parked in such a way that I had to walk across a field to get to the museum. On the field (it was a hot summer day), I felt very cold. It turned out that the field was where the climactic battle of Culloden was fought.

I have never doubted the existence of the unseen, of transcendence, from that day to this.

In 1993, I was in Berlin for a conference. Again, it was a hot summer day. The wall had come down four years before, but no-man’s land was still intact. Walking from (former) West Berlin into (former) East Berlin, I crossed a grassy field and climbed a hill. At the top of the hill, there was a stovepipe sticking out of the ground. Again, suddenly, it was cold. VERY cold. I was standing above the Fuehrerbunker, 40 feet below the ground and undisturbed since 1945.

There is an invisible world, part of creation (all things visible and invisible). Understanding the fact of its existence is essential to being human.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 17, 2008 08:25 PM | Send