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"I hope you'll find this book more than a journal of a war long past. Instead, see it as a testament to growth through experience, to friends who gave more than they asked for in return, and to the potential all of us have for reflecting on our past.
May you be as blessed as I was when you reflect on your own journey."

Dangit, I'm already misty at the dedication page.

"my first and forever friend" is such a beautiful way of referring to one's spouse.

I love me a green knight, or foliate head, or green man, or whatever we're calling this fella:

"Then he beheld an elfin form,
a living woodland wight!
Green was his steed and green his greaves,
his chainmail linked of silver leaves.
He rode out from the forest eaves
and cried, 'Stand fast, false knight!'"

"We know not what shall be achieved,
but even if we fail,
this day will be remembered long,
your honour told in tale and song,
that unto Arthur's court belonged
the coming of the Grail."

There's a strange taunting in the appearance of the Grail. The court already recognizes Galahad as a knight nonpareil. The appearance and the resulting quest, therefore, seem intended to humble Arthur and his remaining knights.

"Then Arthur said to Galahad,
"Sir, you are not alone.
I too stood, with my life unmade,
and set my hand to hilt and blade.
I know the burden on us laid,
who draw a sword from stone!"

I love that Guite called attention to the fascinating throughline of Arthur pulling Caliburn and Galahad pulling Balin's Adventurous Sword from magical stones, thereby proving worthy of a task (kingship and grail quest, respectively).

Chapter 24: Science and Witchcraft is an especially haunting chapter.

Everyone please bless Friedrich Spee for his bravery and clear-eyed logic, which led to some of the most important, persuasive argumentation responsible for finally ending the witchhunts.

The prelude ends with this stanza, in which Guite half-charges other pens with the same task he now undertakes:

"So I have taken up the tale
to tell it full and free.
The tale that makes the heart rejoice,
I tell it, for I have no choice—
I tell it till another voice
takes up the tale from me."

Guite's prelude repeats "Poet, take up the tale" throughout, framing Guite's invocation of the muse (or Awen) as a dutiful answer to the voice's echoing charge to versify the oft-penned story anew. Enchantingly done.

"God would forgive him.

It was a good story. It made him feel better. Stories were useful that way. They smoothed over the gaps and sharp edges of the world."

Merlyn aggressively arguing that communism is what prompts war will only be funny if Arthur contradicts him by noting that feudal Camelot is at war (and has warred several times previously with other feudal societies).

Merlyn railing against equality is deeply unsettling.

"Frontiers were imaginary lines....The imaginary lines on the earth's surface only needed to be unimagined.
The airborne birds skipped them by nature. How mad the frontiers had seemed to Lyo-lyok, and would to Man if he could learn to fly."

The beautiful lesson at long last. I can forgive a lot (though not all) of this book for its final lesson. It's anti-war stance. It really is a beautiful, but marred, book.

"Those who lived by the sword were forced to die by it....It seemed as if the only hope was to not act at all, to draw no swords for anything, to hold omself still, like a pebble not thrown. But that would be hateful."

This presumes, wrongly, that all actions must be violent. That the two choices are 1) inaction, or 2) action with the purpose of harming another.

Lionel and Bors are magically back from the dead. I wonder if this is a Malory joke?

"Desdemona robbed of life or honour is nothing to a Mordred, robbed of himself—his soul stolen, overlaid, wizened, while the mother-character lives in triumph, superfluously and with stifling love endowed on him, seemingly innocent of ill-intention."

I don't want to dismiss T.H. White. I recognize how much there is to love throughout the Once and Future King. But have mercy, I can't surmount his mother-hatred.

"It is the mother’s not the lover’s lust that rots the mind. It is that which condemns the tragic character to his walking death. It is Jocasta, not Juliet, who dwells in the inner chamber. It is Gertrude, not the silly Ophelia, who sends Hamlet to his madness."

Sir, go to therapy.

"These [Cressida, Cleopatra, Delilah] are not the heart of tragedy. They are fripperies to the soul of man. What does it matter if Antony did fall upon his sword? It only killed him. It is the mother’s not the lover’s lust that rots the mind."

Freud would have a field day with White. The mommy-issues hits just keep coming.

Rhysand is allegedly likeable later on, but I can't imagine it. Grabbing the exposed bone of a horrible injury and twisting it to compel "consent" - is not spicy sexy bullying. It's torture.

White comes so close to accurately referring to Elaine's crime against Lancelot as what it is - rape - only to retreat, and to call it a trick, and to excuse it.

I loathe it. Igraine and Lancelot are victims of identical crimes, and while both victimizers get away with it unremarked upon by the authors of the bulk of Arthuriana, Elaine is often treated as if she is in the *right.* It's sickening.

White's casual, jovial sexism and sporadic reminders of his xenophobic preoccupation with indigenous people are a pair of bright stains on what would otherwise be a wonderful body of work.

White's casual, jovial sexism and sporadic reminders of his xenophobic preoccupation with indigenous people is a pair of bright stains on what would otherwise be a wonderful body of work.

Feyre's ceaselessly ableist disdain for her LITERALLY CRIPPLED father makes me break out in fits of wrath. Genuinely, I hate her.

I haven't wept at the end of a book the way I'm weeping now in a good, long while.

I adore the Kwen facta non verba moral stance, and the riverbed notion of yet unfulfilled potential for good. While I don't think intentions count for nothing when weighing the goodness of a person, ultimately, it is the actual impact we have upon others in the real world rather than our theoretical, intended impact that matters.

This magic system! Sanderson, eat your heart out.

Sciona and "Tommy" have met. I'm enchanted, gobsmacked, intrigued. Wang has done a flawless job of making this reader simultaneously sympathetic to Sciona's plight and furious with her dismissive, prejudical treatment of Thomil.

Both Sir Ector and the Lady of the Lake have made miraculous recoveries from death.

I'm impressed with the performances and editing of this dramatization, but every once in a while the anachronistic anglicization of everyone's speech makes me squawk.

I struggle to understand why Graves invented the false narrative about Postumus being framed for attempted rape of Livilla by Livia. It seems explicitly woman-hating to turn Livilla into an accessory to legal entrapment that never appears to have actually happened.