Reading and Remembering

At the moment I'm reading Robert Fisk's The Great War for Civilisation which, as the title doesn't really suggest in an obvious way, is his collected/reworked journalism/memoir from his foreign correspondent postings in the Middle East (as it used to be called when I was a nipper). This is an excellent read so far, for three main reasons: (1) The prose is very tight, powerful, vivid and descriptive; (2) The material deals with Big Events but encompasses the small and the personal, and covers issues that are still resonating powerfully all around us; (3) It reminds me about the big things that I have lived through (vicariously), and which I had half-forgotten - for example, the first section of the book is about Afghanistan, and deals in detail with the Soviet invasion in 1979 and its aftermath, touching peripherally on other contemporary stories - the hanging of President Bhutto in Pakistan, and the Iranian revolution, for example. These stories, and the pictures that Fisk paints of them, remind me of the news coverage of the time, of how I felt about those things, and of my political standpoint (I was switching out of a emotionally Marxist phase and coming to see the Soviet Union as just another self-perpetuating state - I also swallowed [hook, line and sinker] the idea peddled by the media I watched that the mujahideen were 'freedom fighters', and assumed that they must share the democratic values of the liberal west. Ah, happy innocence and simplicity...). These kind of reminders are very powerful for me, and make me realise how...'insulated' i seem to have become as I've grown older - that classic thing about how the middle aged become more conservative (with a small 'c'). It reminds me that I feel more alive when I am intellectually engaged with the wider world.