{"product_id":"2940012152787","title":"PIERRE AND LUCE","description":"This ebook edition has been proofed and corrected and compiled to be read with without errors!\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e***\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTHE ISLE OF CALMS\u003cbr\u003e\"Just as the Gulf Stream embraces the Sargasso Sea into which gradually drift the odds and ends that are carried away by the marine currents into the regions of calm, so does our aerial current surround a region where the air is still. It is called The Isle of Calms.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDuration of the Story\u003cbr\u003eFrom Wednesday evening, January 30, to Good Friday, May 29, 1918.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e*****\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAn excerpt from the beginning of the first chapter:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePierre plunged into the subway. A feverish, a brutal crowd. On his feet near the door, closely pressed in a bank of human bodies and sharing the heavy atmosphere passing in and out of their mouths, he stared without seeing them at the black and rumbling vaults over which flickered the shining eyes of the train. The same heavy shadows lay in his mind, the same gleams, hard and tremulous. Suffocating in the raised collar of his overcoat, his arms jammed against his sides and his lips compressed, his forehead damp with perspiration momentarily cooled by a current from outside when the door opened, he tried hard not to see, he tried not to breathe, he tried not to live. The heart of this young fellow of eighteen, still almost a child, was full of a dull despair. Above his head, above the shadows of these long vaulted ways, of this rat-run through which the monster of metal whirled, all swarming with human masks—was Paris, the snow, the cold January darkness, the nightmare of life and of death—the war.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe war! Four years ago it was, the war had come to stay. It had weighed heavily on his adolescent years. It had caught him by surprise in that morally critical period when the growing boy, disquieted by the awakening of his feelings, discovers with a shock the existence of blind, bestial, crushing forces in life whose prey he is and that without having asked to live at all. And if he happens to be delicate in character, tender of heart and frail as to body in the way Pierre was, he experiences a disgust and horror which he does not dare confide to others for all these brutalities, these nastinesses, all this nonsense of fruitful and devouring nature—this breeding sow that gobbles up her litter of pigs.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn every growing youth between sixteen and eighteen there is a bit of the soul of Hamlet. Don't ask him to understand the war! (All right for you men, who have had your fill!) He has all he can do to understand life and forgive its existence. As a rule he digs himself in with his dream and with the arts, until the time comes when he has got used to his incarnation, and the grub has achieved its agonizing passage from larva to winged insect. What a need he has for peace and meditation during these April days so full of the trouble of maturing life! But they come after him to the bottom of his burrow, look him up, drag him from the dark while still so tender in his new-made skin. They toss him into the raw air amongst the hard human race whose follies and hatreds he is expected at the very first moment to accept without understanding them and, not understanding, to atone for them.","brand":"Leila's Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47069081075952,"sku":"2940012152787","price":1.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/2940012152787_p0.jpg?v=1763553045","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/2940012152787","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}