Je ne suis pas Canadienne

Well, I suppose I should 'fess up and say that I am not remotely Canadian. With the exception of Prince Edward Island, which I looked up assiduously in my Collins World Atlas during my Anne of Green Gables phase, I have hitherto dwelt very little on that northern landmass.

However, Samuel has introduced me to the niceties of Canada. These include Kate Beaton's sly and sparkling comic: Hark! A vagrant, and the band, the New Pornographers.

Hmm, actually, right now I can't remember anything else I like about Canada. Except that they like us, Australians. But I am sure all the glories of that Maple-bedecked land will come back to me.

(There is a rather hilarious episode of the West Wing, when Kate Harper, the Deputy National Security Advisor, discovers that there's an actual US contingency plan - "Operation Northern Lights" - to invade Canada. You can watch it here.)

What I do like, however, is this marvelously free-ranging and frolicksome booklist from Yann Martel, on which we're basing our reading and talking. In this list of 100 books ('read by numbers', geddit?) there's everything ranging from Norse mythology to pop culture analysis; not one, not two, but five collections of poetry; and (impressively), a book by a Chinese author.

I like the way Martel's approached this as well. It's a political stunt, sure. But one that's done respectfully, without superciliousness. As Martel writes, his purpose is "not to educate [Harper] ... less than that ... [but] to make suggestions to his stillness."

It's also a creative project, that functions as a philosophical apologia pro vita sua, too.

Martel argues that busyness is the opiate that drugs us; deludes us to thinking that what we do is so very important, and by corollary, we too, as human beings, must be important. However, it's in stillness, that we become more human. Our hearts are for expanding, our souls for extending, and our minds ache for understanding and beauty. But for these requirements of of existence, we must have quietness:

To read a book, one must be still. To watch a concert, a play, a movie, to look at a painting, one must be still. Religion, too, makes use of stillness, notably with prayer and meditation. Just gazing upon a still lake, upon a quiet winter scene—doesn’t that lull us into contemplation? Life, it seems, favours moments of stillness to appear on the edges of our perception and whisper to us, “Here I am. What do you think?” Then we become busy and the stillness vanishes, yet we hardly notice because we fall so easily for the delusion of busyness, whereby what keeps us busy must be important, and the busier we are with it, the more important it must be. And so we work, work, work, rush, rush, rush. On occasion we say to ourselves, panting, “Gosh, life is racing by.” But that’s not it at all, it’s the contrary: life is still. It is we who are racing by.


So, in the midst of my Greek intensive, and in between marking research essays, I shall find some time, not only to pray, and to read my Bible, but also, hopefully to read Tolstoy, and Lu Xun, and memorise some odd lines of Sappho and Simon Armitage.

Why don't you join us?

- Bei-En