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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
November 27, 2011
Human plurality
Let us celebrate an anniversary. Fifteen years your correspondent has now been writing for the Bytown Packet, also known as the Ottawa Citizen since 1851. I arrived when the paper had barely celebrated its sesquicentennial, in the early moments of the Hollinger regime (Conrad Black). I have now survived several owners, publishers, chief editors, and editorial-page editors; and while each deserves generous thanks for enduring an often controversial, and sometimes difficult writer, I also deserve a modicum of praise for putting up with them.There are nearly one million Blacks in prison in the U.S., and my former big boss is one of them. Let me tip my hat towards him on this occasion - wrongly accused and wrongly convicted - and recommend his most recent book. It is entitled, A Matter of Principle, and if it were nothing else, it is a gripping read. No one will accuse Baron Crossharbour of cowardice, and he makes his case against a miscarriage of justice daringly, formidably, comprehensively, eloquently; and with belly laughs, too. Today is surely a day for self-indulgence - it is also the First Sunday in Advent, the beginning of the Christian liturgical year; the day I have long reserved for making my annual resolutions, and then methodically breaking them. My very first newspaper boss, back in 1970 - the late Richard J. Doyle, editor of The Globe and Mail (later Senator) - said he'd look out for me. This was when I left my employment there, as a copy boy, at age 16, to wander off to Asia. "Dic" would do what he could to advance my interests, adding that, "By my age, all the thrills are vicarious." A serious if secretive Catholic, let me assume he has been doing so from Heaven, since 2003. He was a droll observer of society, journalism, and politics. He was 47 then - in the prime of his life and career. Only today, having surpassed that age, can I fully appreciate his conceit. And yet also the truth, doubly droll, within it. We learn, with any luck as we grow older, that we do not, cannot, live only for ourselves. We live through family, good friends, colleagues, and neighbours; we live for our future, and theirs, of course. But also, the past is not yet done with us. We are, so long as we breathe in this world, spokesmen for others. The ghosts of those who made us as we are, live on inside us; we embody them. Our eyes still see for them, and our tongues are guided by many mentors. All knowledge comes through love - all - and without love, everything is empty. The living remain plural, and everything we know is owed to former loves. Even those centuries dead, recalled only from reading, continue their orations in the Parliament of our soul; and we live to vindicate them. I have tried to compress something rather complex and, I hope, deeply true, in the paragraph just above. It is by segue into another new book I wish to recommend, earnestly, to all who share the taste for poetry. This book, by another of my mentors, has accomplished something astounding. It is by a man who has been known to us chiefly as a journalist, and television producer, but who is really first and last a poet. Poetry is the central act in every language; all other writing is poetry in some dilute form (even when reduced homeopathically, to water); and those who declare "no taste for poetry" pointedly exclude themselves from the very middle of human understanding. George Jonas, The Jonas Variations: A Literary Séance, just published, is autobiography on the highest level. The writer pays homage not to the most "beautiful" or outwardly "meaningful" poems he has ever read - in quite a few languages - but to those which have mysteriously stuck with him. It is a collection of translations, playful imitations, variations and even refutations, woven together not only by the author's unmistakable personality, but by a delightful running commentary of memoirs, vignettes, and useful thumbnail sketches. So that, although it looks like an anthology, it should be read from front to back like a novel. The book not only presents a gallery of poems, but embodies a larger poetical structure, a fine pattern still larger than its parts. Yet it "wrote itself," too, in the way Jonas reports of one item by Rilke: "Piloting a small plane on a hot summer day from Toronto to Windsor, the drone of the engine insisted on repeating the opening words, 'Herr-es-ist-Zeit, Herr-es-ist-Zeit'." By the time he landed, the twelve German lines of Rilke's Autumn Day had become English. Jonas entered them in his pilot's log, crediting the translation to a four-cylinder Lycoming aero-engine. "Lord: It is time. The summer was fair. / Rest your shadow on the sundial's face, / Release the autumn breezes in the air. ..." A Hungarian Jew, forced by circumstances to become an Anglo-Canadian, he mastered our language so well that he belongs now to English literature; and has contributed this book which perfectly expounds the nature of human plurality. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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