American University
Beirut, Syria
December 28, 1938Dear Miss Turner,
Always when I pick up a pen to answer one of your letters I figuratively fit a finer point and survey the sheet with an eye to finer spacing than is my wont. By the last paragraph the words and the sentences have a tendency to slouch in a manner characteristic of my everyday scrawls. What little precision there is in my doings had its main prompting in the old Zo [sic] building.
It is the season for casting up accounts. Your letter has set me thinking. The profound discouragement coming out of any thought of world affairs has no counter force of profound encouragement. I've grown to explain the recurring dulling of the world's beauty with the thought that perhaps all people in growing up meet disillusionment. To morrow [sic] I shall be forty and cheerful at that. It maybe that it is hiding from reality to refuse to accept the horror of Germany today as an expression of a world gone wrong. My device is to take comfort in the thought that the people of Germany are just like other people, and are perhaps by and large not so overwhelmed singly as they have a right to be. When my brother Phil lay paralyzed for those long months in 1917-18, I used to think of the battle fields and that suffering of his multiplied again and again, and the only smallest comfort was to realize that one person could only suffer one persons [sic] pain. In looking at the plight of the Jews - the only thought. No, I don't suppose any thought is comforting. Even here in this centre of broad thinking I am conscious that I as the head of a group am not allowed to do what I would like to do (to) in the admission of students to our school. There is a family here, very close to me, a German Jew & his non Jewish wife. Their home is under the shadow. I asked Anna if little Suzanne would be celebrating Christmas and she said "We have no spirit for that this year" But they gave gifts and received them and made Christmas morning calls. All this is fuzzy expression. It comes to perhaps a summary of the attitude I take of forgetting the whole in my concern for a part of today's scene.
Christmas Eve party at the nurses home will stay with me for many a day. 60 girls of a dozen nations, all content to be with each other, Turkish Moslems who wept all day when Ataturk died, Jewesses whos cousins & brothers have died on the Jaffa road, Syrians and Armenians, Greeks, and Persians, all radiant and merry singing Adeste Fidelis and Silent Night from the bottoms of their hearts & going out with candles under the Syrian sky to sing at the homes of the doctors, Moselm, Jew, and Christian without regard. So I take comfort in details and know that from these days as student nurses, these girls lives will have some corners for warm happy memories. We have letters at this time of year from Egypt, Iraq, Cyprus and other places and the girls always say, "If I were only at Dale Home for Christmas Eve."
It may be too subjective an attitude to take, but once or twice in my life I have been completely disillusioned (there's the word again) and have wriggled out of the dilemma by deciding that what I had believed in in the persons concerned was itself good & however wrong my calculated judgement, that faith was real. Poor reasoning perhaps, but a help in living.
Once you said that one's work is an abiding comfort, not those words, but that idea. My work, as I see it, has the power to stand by me, because of the people & the personal contacts of which it is made. I'm not very good at anything specifically - my studying is slipshod and my ambitions peter out and I talk too much - but here and there there has been a person whose life has touched mine and the value of my work has been in such realities. Maybe I'm alibiing, not entirely though.
No, I'm not profoundly discouraged and I can't believe that the bottom has dropped out of civilization, though perhaps I should. I don't suppose we'll eve see a world that has the seeming of the world before the war - of course we wont. [sic] This age with more people in touch with each other than ever before was bound to get into a mess. Out of confusion must come order, because of the essential goodwill of the ordinary man. That doesn't say what I want it to say. But a world can't be a complete hell doomed to every [sic] lasting flames which contains as much "humanity" as this one does.
Maybe all this is whistling in the dark.
I believe the next generation of children is going to tackle its problems with more clearsightedness & less humbug. Surely that has been said before.
I'm sitting in bed - the sixth day of an infection of the leg - silly - but apparently not avoidable. Perhaps the hours of relative isolation should be responsible for the many words of this script.
Practically well.
We have one brilliant girl in the September 15. The February class promises to be only moderately large, 8 at best. I'd like 12, or 16.
My best wishes to Charlotte. And I've not even mentioned the lovely print of the Chartre[s] window. You are always better to me than anyone should be.
With my love as always
Katy