Quote 70
I breathe deeply and say over to myself: "You are at home; you are at home." But a sense of strangeness will not leave me, I can find nothing of myself in all these things. There is my mother, there is my sister, there is my case of butterflies, and there is the mahogany piano – but I am not myself there. There is a distance, a veil between us. (7.127)
Where does this veil come from? If Paul were able to spend more time at home, do you think this strangeness would ever leave him? Or do you think he will forever be lost?
Quote 71
Here my thoughts stop and will not go any farther. All that meets me, all that floods over me are but feelings – greed of life, love of home, yearning of the blood, intoxication of deliverance. But no aims. (12.4)
Why doesn't Paul have any aims at this point? Paul seems to continually try to suppress his feelings at witnessing the deaths of his friends and other horrors of the war, but in this moment, he tells us that "feelings" flood over him. Are these feelings that he's previously tried to suppress? How has he changed?
Quote 72
And men will not understand us – for the generation that grew up before us, though it has passed these years with us here, already had a home and a calling; now it will return to its old occupations, and the war will be forgotten – and the generation that has grown up after us will be strange to us and push us aside. We will be superfluous even to ourselves, we will grow older, a few will adapt themselves, some others will merely submit, and most will be bewildered; – the years will pass by and in the end we shall fall into ruin. (12.6)
Why will the next generation "push" Paul's generation aside? Is he referring to the way in which his generation pushed aside those older? These young men who came of age fighting in such a horrible war have no lives to return to. The war was their first real life experience – they know nothing else.