Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. was a medical pioneer and a powerful writer living in Massachusetts during the Civil War. His son, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., served as an officer in the 20th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry fighting at the front lines of the conflict.
In the summer of 1861, the elder Holmes penned an essay called “Bread and the Newspaper” for The Atlantic Monthly magazine describing the emotional and psychological impacts on those living during the shocking events of 1861. This is a particularly powerful excerpt from the essay:
Some of the symptoms we shall mention are almost universal; they are as plain in the people we meet everywhere as the marks of an influenza, when that is prevailing.
The first is a nervous restlessness of a very peculiar character. Men cannot think, or write, or attend to their ordinary business. They stroll up and down the streets, or saunter out upon the public places. We confessed to an illustrious author that we laid down the volume of his work which we were reading when the war broke out. It was as interesting as a romance, but the romance of the past grew pale before the red light of the terrible present.
Meeting the same author not long afterwards, he confessed that he had laid down his pen at the same time that we had closed his book. He could not write about the sixteenth century any more than we could read about it, while the nineteenth was in the very agony and bloody sweat of its great sacrifice.
Another most eminent scholar told us in all simplicity that he had fallen into such a state that he would read the same telegraphic dispatches over and over again in different papers, as if they were new, until he felt as if he were an idiot. Who did not do just the same thing, and does not often do it still, now that the first flush of the fever is over?
Another person always goes through the side streets on his way for the noon extra,–he is so afraid somebody will meet him and tell the news he wishes to read, first on the bulletin- board, and then in the great capitals and leaded type of the newspaper.
When any startling piece of war-news comes, it keeps repeating itself in our minds in spite of all we can do. The same trains of thought go tramping round in circle through the brain, like the supernumeraries that make up the grand army of a stage-show. Now, if a thought goes round through the brain a thousand times in a day, it will have worn as deep a track as one which has passed through it once a week for twenty years.
This accounts for the ages we seem to have lived since the twelfth of April last [date of the bombardment of Fort Sumter], and, to state it more generally, for that ex post facto operation of a great calamity, or any very powerful impression, which we once illustrated by the image of a stain spreading backwards from the leaf of life open before as through all those which we have already turned.
Blessed are those who can sleep quietly in times like these! Yet, not wholly blessed, either; for what is more painful than the awaking from peaceful unconsciousness to a sense that there is something wrong, we cannot at first think what,–and then groping our way about through the twilight of our thoughts until we come full upon the misery, which, like some evil bird, seemed to have flown away, but which sits waiting for us on its perch by our pillow in the gray of the morning?
The converse of this is perhaps still more painful. Many have the feeling in their waking hours that the trouble they are aching with is, after all, only a dream,–if they will rub their eyes briskly enough and shake themselves, they will awake out of it, and find all their supposed grief is unreal…
What do you think of this essay and Holmes’ description of life during turbulent times? Let me know if the comments!
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