(Stephen Lea­cock) Behind the Beyond 
. . . . 14545. (Don­ald Cameron) Intro­duc­tion [pref­ace]
. . . . 14546. (Stephen Lea­cock) Behind the Beyond, A Mod­ern Prob­lem Play [arti­cle]
. . . . 14547. (Stephen Lea­cock) With the Pho­tog­ra­ph­er [arti­cle]
. . . . 14548. (Stephen Lea­cock) The Den­tist and the Gas [arti­cle]
. . . . 14549. (Stephen Lea­cock) My Lost Oppor­tu­ni­ties [arti­cle] Read more »

This is Far­ley Mowat’s odd book about a pos­si­ble pre-viking Euro­pean pres­ence in the Cana­di­an Arctic.

Mowat is very care­ful to warn the read­er that he is engag­ing in a kind of spec­u­la­tive archae­ol­o­gy. He even inter­spers­es the text with lit­tle pas­sages of adven­ture fic­tion. But it is also clear that he has con­vinced him­self pret­ty thor­ough­ly that his spec­u­la­tions cor­re­spond to what actu­al­ly hap­pened. And the result is, of course, one of those books where a chap­ter begins with the asser­tion that some­thing might have hap­pened , which by the end of the chap­ter has been grad­u­al­ly trans­formed into what cer­tain­ly did hap­pen , and then becomes the premise for the next chap­ter, which begins with if that hap­pened, then this might have hap­pened , and so on. Grad­u­al­ly, a huge sequence of sup­po­si­tions begins to have the appear­ance of a frame­work of sol­id evi­dence, when it is most clear­ly not.

What he begins with is some­thing which is ver­i­fi­ably true. The east­ern Arc­tic of Cana­da is lit­tered with odd ruins and mega­lith­ic struc­tures that can not be eas­i­ly attrib­uted to the Inu­it, or to the ear­li­er Dorset or Thule cul­tures. Nor do they appear to be built by the Norse. They are def­i­nite­ly very old. The most inter­est­ing con­cen­tra­tions are on the west­ern shore of Unga­va bay, and in a bay imme­di­ate­ly south of the spec­tac­u­lar Torn­gat range, in Labrador. Read more »

This is a rea­son­ably inter­est­ing nov­el, though not eco­nom­i­cally writ­ten. It’s a sprawl­ing omnibus of digres­sions, com­bin­ing fan­tasy, mys­ti­cism, pol­i­tics and a kind of Jules et Jim tri­an­gle romance. Mulisch is intel­li­gent, learned, and absolute­ly sat­u­rated with con­ven­tional sys­tems and intel­lec­tual ortho­doxy. There is a lot of thought in this book, but not a par­ti­cle of orig­i­nal thought. This is, unfor­tu­nately, sup­posed to be the great mas­ter­piece of mod­ern Dutch lit­er­a­ture. Well, the Dutch have blessed the world with won­der­ful paint­ing and archi­tec­ture, and their trance djs are superb, but lit­er­a­ture just doesn’t seem to be their strong point. Nev­er­the­less, I might rec­om­mend it for a lazy afternoon’s read­ing. The inter­ac­tion of the char­ac­ters is some­times interesting.

An inter­est­ing his­tor­i­cal nov­el set in the peri­od of Romu­lus Augus­tus, the last Roman Emper­or in the West­ern Empire. The book is trans­lated from Ital­ian. It is fast-paced adven­ture fic­tion, writ­ten in the spir­it of Alexan­dre Dumas. There is a “sur­prise” end­ing, which the read­er will prob­a­bly see com­ing fair­ly ear­ly in the game. Though most of the action takes place in Italy, it is suf­fused with the “Mat­ter of Britain”. Doesn’t any­one ever write about late Roman Spain, or Nor­ica, or Africa?

Donne is best when he writes of love or death, dullest when build­ing “meta­phys­i­cal” struc­tures or play­ing games with theology.

Where, like a pil­low on a bed,
A preg­nant bank swell’d up, to rest
The violet’s reclin­ing head,
Sat we two, one another’s best.
Our hands were firm­ly cemented
With a fast balm, which thence did spring,
Our eye-beams twist­ed, and did thread
Our eyes, upon one double-string;
So to inter­graft our hands, as yet
Was all the means to make us one,
And pic­tures in our eyes to get
Was all our prop­a­ga­tion.

Vlad the Impaler rep­re­sent­ed as Pon­tius Pilate judg­ing Jesus Christ, 1463 (artist unknown)

This seems to be the best book on Vlad III of Wal­lachia, the his­tor­i­cal “Drac­ula”. It at least explodes the sil­li­est inter­pre­ta­tions, put for­ward by Marx­ists under the Ceauces­cu regime, that seem to have found their way into many sec­ondary sources. Vlad seems to have been a per­fectly ordi­nary lit­tle gang­ster, com­mit­ting plen­ty of atroc­i­ties, but not much dif­fer­ent in style and moti­va­tion from those of oth­er thugs rul­ing prin­ci­pal­i­ties. Com­pared to the colos­sal out­rages of the reli­gious wars that tore Ger­many apart, soon after, it was all small potatoes.

While Vlad enjoyed tor­tur­ing peo­ple and impal­ing them, he was no more vicious than, say, the Ref­or­ma­tion the­olo­gian John Calvin, who enjoyed tor­tur­ing peo­ple by slow­ly roast­ing them on a spit while their heads were soaked with cold water to pro­long the agony .… a tor­ture that he once con­demned two chil­dren to. And he isn’t any more of a mon­ster than Guata­mala’s dic­ta­tor José Ríos Montt, whom Ronald Rea­gan admired and called “a man of great per­sonal integri­ty and commitment.”

A stat­ue of René Descartes in Den Haag, Nether­lands. I once sat below it, eat­ing a lunch of Patat­je Jop­pie (fries with Jop­piesaus) and pick­led herring.

Descarte’s chief impor­tance to us now lies in his men­tal atti­tude, and his approach to solv­ing prob­lems. He did not always come to con­clu­sions that I can accept, and some­times did not live up to his own meth­ods, but the sig­nif­i­cant thing is that he tried to look at the world in a way that would be famil­iar to a sci­en­tist in our time, or to any schol­ar, lawyer, doc­tor, or tech­ni­cian try­ing to main­tain an objec­tive, ratio­nal discipline.

For­mally, the Med­i­ta­tions are writ­ten in the “dialec­tic” style that was the her­itage of medieval and renais­sance phi­los­o­phy. But Descartes was not inter­ested in the medieval tech­nique of com­par­ing author­i­ties and mak­ing an “argu­ment”. He was more inter­ested in the ques­tions: “What can I claim to know?” “How shall I dis­tin­guish between what I believe, and what I can claim as proven?”

Every sci­en­tist and lawyer is now famil­iar with the impor­tance of these ques­tions. I can step out­side and see a man rob­bing anoth­er man at gun­point. After the event, I can give tes­ti­mony to this, but oth­er peo­ple need not believe me if I can­not cor­rob­o­rate it. I myself might not be cer­tain, for instance, that it was not a vivid dream, which I mis­took for expe­ri­ence. A chemist might see a sig­nif­i­cant reac­tion in a test-tube. Yet, he expects oth­er sci­en­tists to sus­pend judg­ment on his report until it can be dupli­cated. The phras­ing of his report will be care­fully thought out to reflect the epis­te­mo­log­i­cal and judi­cial con­sid­er­a­tions that sci­ence depends on. There are hints and pre­mo­ni­tions of this atti­tude in ear­lier thinkers, like Aris­to­tle, Euclid, Ibn Sin­na, and Aquinas, but it is Descartes who brings them to the fore­front, and con­cen­trates on them. Read more »

Nurs­ing Sis­ter at Fort Churchill, Man­i­to­ba, prepar­ing to board an RCAF De Hav­il­land Otter. Cana­di­an-made bush planes such as the Otter and Beaver were the “cov­ered wag­ons” of the Cana­di­an North (Library and Archives Cana­da Pho­to, MIKAN No. 4234435)

This book was pub­lished in 1956, and it reflects a time when Cana­di­ans had very dif­fer­ent things to think about. This was the peri­od when a num­ber of peo­ple became inspired by visions of the North­ern Fron­tier. French-speak­ing Cana­di­ans seem to have been more caught up in it than Eng­lish-speak­ing Cana­di­ans, who seem to have been more attract­ed to the mag­ic of the bloom­ing sub­urbs, but there were books like this pub­lished in both lan­guages. The North was bristling with poten­tial min­eral wealth. The 1940s had already seen a Pio­neer Move­ment, which was espe­cially encour­aged by influ­en­tial peo­ple in Que­bec, who want­ed to divert the leak­age of French Cana­di­ans migrat­ing to New Eng­land (where they would cer­tainly lose their lan­guage) into the North­ern and West­ern Cana­da, where they would be able to keep it. This meant mov­ing into the last remain­ing untouched patch­es of pos­si­ble agri­cul­tural land in North Amer­ica, and home­steading under the most extreme con­di­tions. Some set­tle­ments failed, some­times home­steads would be aban­doned in moment of despair, the cof­fee pot left boil­ing on the stove. (It’s iron­ic that my moth­er, from an ancient Que­bec fam­ily along the St. Lawrence, expe­ri­enced both. Her fam­ily moved to Mass­a­chu­setts to get work in the mills, but when she fin­ished school, she returned to Cana­da and wound up in a sub­arc­tic Ontario min­ing town.)

Read more »

Thore­au is one of those peo­ple that you might read as a teenag­er, then keep in the back of your mind for the rest of your life. But do you get around to re-read­ing him lat­er in life? One thing that strikes me now, on reread­ing him, is how much he gets dis­tort­ed by false mem­o­ry. How many peo­ple have decid­ed that the ide­al life is on a farm, and talk about Thore­au and “sim­plic­i­ty”? But for the actu­al Thore­au, farm life was the com­plex rat race he was flee­ing from! He com­plained that every­one he knew was car­ry­ing a barn on their back. One man’s sim­plic­ity is anoth­er man’s 1984, I sup­pose. The econ­o­mist John Ken­neth Gal­braith who had grown up on one of those dour Scot­tish-Cana­di­an farms in south­ern Ontario once explained that after milk­ing cows with frozen teats on sub­zero morn­ings and bail­ing hay by hand, noth­ing he ever did as an adult was clas­si­fi­able as work, and he would much rather be a pro­fes­sor than go back to that sim­plic­ity, thanky­ou very much. I did my own fair share of farm work, and even with more mod­ern machin­ery, I know exact­ly what he meant. Try stand­ing up to your knees in half frozen sheep shit while cold driz­zle soaks into you, for an entire day, while you wres­tle fierce­ly kick­ing ani­mals to the ground, one after anoth­er. Sim­plic­ity, indeed.

On reread­ing, I found Walden and Civ­il Dis­obe­di­ence to be pret­ty much as I remem­bered them. Thore­au made it clear in Walden that he was mak­ing an exper­i­ment in self-dis­ci­pline, not design­ing a blue­print for every­one to live by. He had enough sense to know that if every­one tried to live off the beans in their back­yard, the result would be grind­ing medieval pover­ty, not inde­pen­dence. He was not going off to live in a cave. He walked to town every day to see his friends, and he even went off on lengthy jaunts of tourism.

His trav­el jour­nals con­tain some of his most enter­tain­ing writ­ing. His prose style is remark­ably mod­ern-sound­ing for the 1850s. His obser­va­tion of sen­sory detail was also unusu­al for the peri­od. A read­er hav­ing no appro­pri­ate clues might place the prose style at cir­ca 1910. “A Yan­kee In Cana­da” describes the Charlevoix region north of Que­bec City, a place I did a few hun­dred kliks of walk­a­bout in, with Fil­ip Marek. Thore­au spoke French rea­son­ably well (he was of Chan­nel Island ances­try), and asked ques­tions every­where. He was not only pre-occu­pied with nature, which describes with pre­ci­sion, but with eco­nomic and social facts as well. For exam­ple, he not­ed that the vot­ing fran­chise was wider in Cana­da East than in New Eng­land, that the British still treat­ed Que­bec as a gar­ri­son town (it is still 17 years before Con­fed­er­a­tion), and which vari­eties of fruits and cloth were import­ed and exported.

One thing he got iron­i­cally wrong. He noticed a large num­ber of stone Church­es, imag­in­ing them to be a lega­cy of Nor­mandy. But, in fact, most of the orig­i­nal church­es of Que­bec had been made of wood, in a sim­ple style impro­vised by the Habi­tants. Over the next two cen­turies, most of these church­es suc­cumbed to the inevitable fires, and only a hand­ful of them sur­vive today on the Ile d’Orleans. But the style sur­vived. The Eng­lish set­tlers of New Eng­land, also com­ing from a land of stone church­es, copied the Que­bec wood­en church­es, per­fect­ing them into the dis­tinc­tive white Con­gre­ga­tional jew­els that still make many New Eng­land vil­lages sub­limely beau­ti­ful. The pret­ty stone and tin-roofed church­es that Thore­au saw along the St. Lawrence were most­ly built short­ly before he saw then.. They are usu­ally paint­ed white in the trim­mings, and built of pale gray stone, so that a Que­bec vil­lage has a visu­al charm almost as strik­ing as a Ver­mont one, but the effect is dif­fer­ent. The “strip vil­lage” dom­i­nates in Que­bec, fol­low­ing river­banks, evolved from farm lots that are nar­row on the roads, but extend for miles back into the for­est. This con­fig­u­ra­tion is crit­i­cal in harsh win­ters, when the walk­ing time to the near­est neigh­bour can deter­mine life or death. By con­trast, New Eng­land vil­lages focus on a square, and are much more com­pact, but out­ly­ing farms must be ser­viced by more road mileage. He was, of course, fas­ci­nated by the Catholi­cism in Cana­da, as any New Eng­lan­der would be, but he was not hos­tile. He was equal­ly fas­ci­nated by the omnipresent kilt­ed Scots High­landers, hav­ing appar­ently nev­er seen so many bare male legs.

But Thoreau’s prose is won­der­ful, and you can just pic­ture your­self hav­ing a cheer­ful after­noon pok­ing around in the woods with him. He claimed to have been a hap­py man, and per­haps he wasn’t lying.