Tomorrow is Remembrance Day, as I persist in calling it; I’ll never get used to Veterans Day. About some things I am immune to cant, unable, for example, to clap for our men and women in uniform on airplane flights (that was a thing for a few years after 9/11, not so much any more), but about others I’m terribly sentimental. And always at this time of year I think about the deliciously solemn Remembrance Day assemblies of my Canadian childhood, the lusty intoning of “In Flanders Field” (how I loved that poem), the reveling in the myths of Vimy, the crucible that forged a nation, etc, etc. I know there’s pious and even pernicious hooey surrounding the holiday, but I miss wearing a poppy, I really think that’s a beautiful tradition, and I also miss the weather, which in my memory anyway is blustery and miserable with a little sleet or snow in the air.

My feelings about Canada are especially turbulent this week, after the US election debacle. As someone who really could go to Canada, but who can’t figure out what he’d do once he got there, I’m at once even more susceptible than usual this week to nostalgic feelings for home and yet not entirely convinced that it still is home. Indeed, there’s nothing like finding out that half of the electorate is fine with overt misogyny, antisemitism, homophobia, Islamaphobia and hatred of of people of colour generally to make you question what home really means.

At any rate, in honour of Remembrance Day, here’s a passage from the incomparable Henry Green’s memoir Pack my Bag, published in 1940 when, he notes, he was only thirty-five, because he was convinced he would die in the coming war. (He served in the Auxiliary Fire Service during the Blitz, dangerous work described vividly in Caught, one of his nine beautiful and elliptical novels.) About a third of the way through the memoir, Green describes how his wealthy family’s estate was turned into an officer’s convalescent home during the First World War. Twelve-year-old Green is fascinated by the men, especially a shell-shocked Australian:

Unattractive in every way, small, ugly, with no interests one could find, he had haunted eyes as though death to which he was still so close and which walked arm in arm with him through our meadows could be a horror worse than what he was still suffering. He did not sleep, he hardly ate, he shook all day and he was like an old specimen jar which is cracked and irreplaceable, others are made which may be better but they do not know how to make them the same, so cracked that a shout will set up vibrations enough to shatter it in jagged pieces, so that if one laughed he always screamed. If forty yards away you banged the door he screamed.

Green’s amazing, idiosyncratic, and amazingly idiosyncratic syntax is on full display here. The soldier isn’t exactly appealing—the use of “ugly,” which at first seems redundant, suggests that the opening modifier is about something more essential than his looks, though they’re clearly not up to much either. Yet by the end of the passage we sympathize with him, partly through the upending of the pastoral tradition (et in Arcadia ego), in which death is intimately present (walking arm in arm with him though the meadows) yet nonetheless subordinate to a trauma of such magnitude it can only be described indirectly (“what he was still suffering”). I can’t quite figure out how “still” is being used in that first sentence. It appears twice—does it mean the same thing each time? He’s still so close to death—which presumably refers to the battlefields he’s ostensibly convalescing from—but he’s still suffering from shell shock. Death and horror are differentiated from, even opposed to, each other, but the soldier nonetheless seems to experience both at the same time.

If anything, the next sentence is even harder to parse, offering a fine example of the wayward rhythms of Green’s prose, which sometimes seem to replicate speech, or more accurately a particular kind of associative logic that characterizes speech rather than anything one might actually say. The old specimen jar is presumably an antique jar, but it could be a jar for an old specimen, which is what the solder seems to be to the boy Green. Specimen is from the Latin “to look”—it’s a jar you’d put moths or plants or other living things into. In this sense the soldier is said to be preserved but also stifled or entombed, as if the jar were a mausoleum, yet a broken one that is nonetheless valuable (“cracked and irreplaceable”). The almost parenthetical observation “others are made which may be better but they do not know how to make them the same” suggests both outmodedness and singularity, assuming that “the same” means “the same as the cracked but irreplaceable specimen jar that the soldier is like” and not “the same as each other,” which admittedly would be weird since it would suggest the newfangled models are unique rather than mass-produced.

This clause—“others are made which may be better but they do not know how to make them the same”—is even harder to figure out because we can’t at first be sure of its relationship to the next one, which reads “so cracked that a shout will set up vibrations enough to shatter it in jagged pieces.” At first I thought this clause modified the one about the other jars that might be better but aren’t the same, as if the reason they aren’t the same, that is, the reason they seem to have something wrong with them even though they’re supposedly better is that they’re cracked and ready to break at the mere sound of a shout. But if that were the case, Green ought to have said “enough to shatter them in jagged pieces.” I realized, then, that this clause is actually connected to one before the one before it, namely, the original description of the man as a cracked but irreplaceable specimen jar. That’s what’s “so cracked that a shout will set up vibrations enough to shatter it in jagged pieces,” the echo or half-rhyme of the double consonants in “shatter” and “jagged” imitating the sharp, abrasive quality the words are describing.

All of which leads us to the final clause, “so that if one laughed he always screamed.” Initially we might take it to be parallel with the previous one—after all they both start with “so”—but we soon see isn’t. “So” means something different in each case. The first “so” (“so cracked that a shout”) is an intensifier (the jar is very cracked); the second (“so that if one laughed”) is a coordinating conjunction meaning “such that.”

After this extraordinary sentence—which like many others in Green’s books must be read several times before they can be parsed—the passage’s concluding sentence is much simpler but no less moving for that. It’s an extension of the previous sentence, which has told us that a laugh, which apparently is felt by the man as a shout, makes him scream. Even something as simple and distant as the banging of a door does so too. We’re left with the image of a man so raw, so broken that ordinary life has become terrifying and intolerable.

Of course we already know this, because in the sentences just before the passage I’ve focused on here Green tells us: “He was no longer human when he came to us. He committed suicide when he left to go home [to Australia], he found the bustle on board ship to much for him.”

To you from failing hands we throw the torch, etc, etc.