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COMMENTARY
April 30, 2008
Precariousness
Write each column as if it were your last. And sooner or later it will be,” an editor once explained. I recall this sage advice, upon returning to my day job, after annual leave. And with my first deadline falling smack on my 55th birthday. (That is, yesterday. If you haven’t sent a card, it is already too late.) Five weeks of staying as far from the news as I could contrive to get. Some of this time spent fighting curiosity.But most of it caring for ancient parents, now shifted to a nursing home from their need for constant medical supervision. This is a common experience among baby-boomers, as my much younger, current editor explains: no call for “empathy” there. And my many contemporaries, whose parents are neither dead nor disowned, may well have learned that no empathy is appropriate. For the experience, though painful, is full of reward. Verily, this is among the forgotten truths of what I call, for shorthand, “post-modernity” -- a.k.a. “the mall culture” or “the age of abortion” -- that all human reward is founded in pain. That all true joy is founded in duty; and freedom in duty, too. That, in the words of my priest, “Principles are something you pay for, not something you collect on.” And let me add, since we are dealing in old saws this morning, that one cannot begin to appreciate the glory and beauty and preciousness of a human life, until one has grasped how tenuous and transient it is. To this end, I recommend pushing a stroke victim out in his wheelchair, under the spring sun amid birdsong -- and the laughter of children playing in a schoolyard -- after he has been shut in the whole winter. An old man who cannot talk, but does not need words to radiate his pleasure, in being still alive. An old man who suddenly defies his condition, to tell his crippled old wife, after sixty-something years through thick and thin together, that he still loves her. I was going to write today about certain items in the news -- specifically about our government’s cowardly failure to intervene in defence of freedom of speech and press, as Canada’s ideologized “human rights” commissions mount their increasingly vigorous assault on “thought crimes” -- but that battle can wait till Saturday. (My mind is still re-gearing.) The whole earth often appears a war zone, for the battle against human malice and stupidity must never be given up. It is a war that must moreover be fought in charity and good humour, for that is the ultimate confutation of all the devil’s claims. “First heal thyself,” for the front line runs through every human heart, and it is there the tyrant must first be defeated. I make this (unoriginal) observation after considerable research. My holiday, when not at the call of my parents, was spent mostly sorting family archives, rich in paper and pictures from both sides. This is another part of the experience, passing down the generations. Family is at the root of every civilization, and the lore of a family -- extending through space and time -- is the formation of every child not abandoned at birth. It is a precarious thing, getting born -- especially these days, but also in the past.rn rnItem, from the letters of my paternal grandparents, “Mabel” and “Roy.” The family belief is that it is a wonderful correspondence between two tempestuous young lovers, tragically separated when grandpa was sent off into the South American wild as a geological cartographer from Imperial Oil. A closer reading reveals, that grandpa did write earnest love letters. He went to heroic lengths to get them mailed, from jungles and mountaintops, and hid his disappointment at the few replies. He wrote ten letters for every one from Mabel. And each of those letters ten times the length of one of hers. And every sentence with ten times her passion and commitment. On his way back north, at the end of this adventure, flush with cash, he sent her money so she could meet him in New York. He'd separately sent a letter to a lawyer, asking if a marriage in New York City would be recognized in Canada. (Duh, yes.) Mabel got the money, but did not show up. It was another year before Roy finally cornered her in a Methodist church. (For, once grandpa had an idea in his head, he wouldn't give up.) Result: one big, happy family.rn rnItem, just after returning from the last World War, my papa rented an aeroplane -- an old Tiger Moth trainer I think it was. He called his mom and dad, then buzzed them, skimming up the Credit River, right in front of their house. At the last second, he noticed there were cables slung from the railway bridge, and decided not to fly under it. Result: my column today. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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