War & Peace Quote by James Dickey

Modern war, Dickey reminds us, is engineered to feel like weather: catastrophic, impersonal, and no one in particular's fault. The line’s quiet horror is in its geometry. Destruction radiates outward “miles and miles away,” while the “source” is not a factory, a general, or a nation, but a “human being.” By pinning causality to a person at the very end, he snaps the reader back to moral scale. Distance isn’t just physical; it’s psychological insulation.

The intent feels less like a pacifist slogan than an indictment of modernity’s favorite trick: converting action into procedure. “Takes place” is bureaucratic language for obliteration. It suggests that violence has been routinized, distributed across systems, and laundered through technology until agency becomes hard to locate. Dickey’s phrasing exposes the fraud. Someone still “has caused it.” The bomb might be guided, the drone might be piloted from a trailer, the missile might be launched by a committee, but the ethical origin remains stubbornly human.

Context matters: Dickey lived through the mid-century transformation of warfare, from World War II’s industrial firepower to the Cold War’s abstraction and Vietnam-era remote lethality. His fiction and poetry often orbit masculinity, risk, and the uneasy romance Americans project onto violence. This sentence punctures that romance. It argues that modern war’s defining feature isn’t merely scale or speed, but the way it allows the perpetrator to remain intact - geographically distant, emotionally buffered, and therefore terrifyingly ordinary.