Great Days
the same week-end has brought New Zealand mood Friday, Anzac Day, and St. George’s Day (which is also the anniversary of the birth of Shakespeare); and it will be a long time before it happens again. Anzac Day had not come into our lives when Good Friday last fell on St. George’s Day, and it may have ceased to mean what it still does to most people before the conjunction is repeated, No one can see far enough into the future to say that what moves him will still have power to move his grandchildren; although most of us take the risk, our faith is just a pious hope, Once at least in the present war, and perhaps twice, we have been near enough to political extinction to create the feeling that we are now almost ‘the survivors of a wreck. If Britain had fallen to Germany, New Zealand would already have been Japanese, and while that would not have been.the end of Christianity it would have been the end in New Zealand for an indefinite time of saints’ days and Christian commemorations, And there could have been no surviving national days in a community whose history ended almost as’ soon as it began. Anzac Day would have meant as much after a century of occupation by Japan as the day now means to us that saw the fall of Kaiapohia Pa, Shakespeare’s birthday would have been as well remembered as we remember the birthday of Hiroshige. We must not assume that it can’t happen here with great days as it has happened in so many other places in the course of history. We can merely thank God that it has not happened. Christianity remains (for all the things we have ourselves done to destroy it). The Anzac tradition remains (in spite of the carelessness that nearly killed it). Shakespeare remains (in defiance of the things we do to him on the stage and in our schoolrooms). That day of wrath on which our civilisation so nearly dissolved in ashes was warded off by the things, the still great and moving things, of which this week-end carries so many reminders. l’ has not happened before that
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19430422.2.9
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 8, Issue 200, 22 April 1943, Page 3
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368Great Days New Zealand Listener, Volume 8, Issue 200, 22 April 1943, Page 3
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Copyright in the work University Entrance by Janet Frame (credited as J.F., 22 March 1946, page 18), is owned by the Janet Frame Literary Trust. The National Library has been granted permission to digitise this article and make it available online as part of this digitised version of the New Zealand Listener. You can search, browse, and print this article for research and personal study only. Permission must be obtained from the Janet Frame Literary Trust for any other use.
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