Art and culture, even when the bombs are falling

Chauvel cave art (Getty Images)

"If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavourable. Favourable conditions never come....

    "If men had postponed the search for knowledge until they were secure, the search would never have begun. We are mistaken when we compare war with 'normal life.' Life has never been normal. Even those periods which we think most tranquil, like the nineteenth century, turn on on closer inspection to be full of crises, alarums, difficulties, emergencies. Plausible reasons have never been lacking for putting off all merely cultural activities until some imminent danger has been averted or some crying injustice put right. But humanity long ago chose to neglect those plausible reasons. They wanted knowledge and beauty now, and would not wait for the suitable moment that would never come. Periclean Athens leaves us not only the Parthenon but the 'Funeral Oration.' The insects have chosen a different line: they have sought first the material welfare and security of the hive, and presumably they have their reward. Men are different. They propound mathematical theorems in beleaguered cities, conduct metaphysical arguments in condemned cells, make jokes on scaffolds, discuss the last new poem while advancing to the walls of Quebec, and comb their hair at Thermopylae. This is not panache; it is our nature.

~ author CS Lewis, preaching at Oxford University in Autumn 1939, as WWII had just started, on the importance of 'Learning in Wartime'

"Trenches full of poets/A ragged army"