1. Introduction
Last week we took a daytrip to Stonewall. The town and quarry are associated with Carol Shield's book, The Stone Diaries, the way Prince Edward Island and Lucy Maud Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables are associated. It's funny, you know... a few weeks ago, I followed a link to this essay titled "The Case Against Travel" in which Agnes Callard writes: "And, although people like to talk about their travels, few of us like to listen to them. Such talk resembles academic writing and reports of dreams: forms of communication driven more by the needs of the producer than the consumer." She's not wrong, except that I wish what she said about academic writing were not so generally true. But I digress...
2. This idea of travel
I'm not writing about the trip to Stonewall, although, look, here's a nice picture...
While Callard made a case against travel, and I'm nodding along with her argument, Tyler Cowen wrote: "Travel makes you a better reader, especially for history, geography, (factual) economics, and political science." And instantly, I agree... this dish we are cooking on the subject of travel just got more exciting. You wouldn't call a short day trip outside of Winnipeg "travel" really... not much beyond a lunch was packed, no passport photos were taken, but when I go and re-read the notes I'd taken from The Stone Diaries all those years ago, there is a bit of that feeling of travel...
3. Going through time
In The Stone Diaries, Shields writes this long bit that I can't bear to cut down any shorter than this...
It has never been easy for me to understand the obliteration of time, to accept, as others seem to do, the swelling and corresponding shrinkage of seasons or the conscious acceptance that one year has ended and another begun. There is something here that speaks of our essential helplessness and how the greater substance of our lives is bound up with waste and opacity. Even the sentence parts seize on the tongue, so that to say "Twelve years passed" is to deny the fact of biographical logic. How can so much time hold so little, how can it be taken from us? Months, weeks, days, hours misplaced - and the most precious time of life, too, when our bodies are at their greatest strength, and open, as they never will be again, to the onslaught of sensation. For twelve years, from age fourteen to twenty-six, my father, young Cuyler Goodwill, rose early, ate a bowl of oatmeal porridge, walked across the road to the quarry where he worked a nine-and-a-half-hour-day, then returned to the chill and meagerness of his parents' house and prepared for an early bed.
The recounting of a life is a cheat, of course; I admit the truth of this; even our own stories are obscenely distorted; it is a wonder really that we keep faith with the simple container of our existence. During that twelve-year period it is probable that my father's morning porridge was sometimes thin and sometimes thick. It is likely, too, that he rubbed up against the particulars of passion, snatched from overheard conversations with his fellow workers or the imperatives of puberty, or caught between the words of popular songs or rare draughts of strong drink. He did attend the annual Bachelor's Ball, he did shake the hand of Lord Stanley when the old fellow steam-whistled through in 1899. My father was not blind, despite the passivity of his youthful disposition, nor was he stupid. He must have looked about from time to time and observed that even in the dead heart of his parent's house there existed minor alterations of mood and varying tints of feeling. Nevertheless, twelve working years passed between the time he left school and the day he met and fell in love with Mercy Stone and found his life utterly changed. Miraculously changed.
4. A lasagne of time
Shields uses the expression "obliteration of time" and it feels as though Stonewall were a place where one can really feel this. In the newly-restored interpretive center, where upstairs, events like the local Garden Club's 60th "Flower, Fruit and Vegetable" show was occuring as we, downstairs were admiring a pillar of of geological layers that the sign was telling us was to be understood like a lasagne. First, a layer of stone for building, and below that, limestone, burned and used for quicklime, or calcium oxide, sandwiched between other layers, in an earth history that spirals out like a pencil shaving in which our period, the human one, is just the first traces of pencil lead in all that compression of time.
And yet, this magnificent idea, that in spite of "obliteration" there is this undeniable fact of presence. Sheilds writes:
Her mama's no more than a little itty bitty story in her life now, something from way, way back when, and that's the way my mama is for me. You can tell that story in five minutes flat. You can blink and miss it. But you can't make it go away. Your mama's inside you. You can feel her moving and breathing and sometimes you can hear her talking to you, saying the same things over and over, like watch out now, be careful, be good, now don't get yourself hurt.
5. Time as space enough
Beautiful as those quotes from The Stone Diaries are, one of my favourite quotes from Carol Shields is a passage in Startle and Illuminate.
...by 1996, likely much earlier, Carol had achieved an important insight. Time was precious but it was not fleeting. She had raised a large family. She had published dozens of books. She had travelled. She had read. She had sustained a long marriage and empowering, delight-filled friendships. She had talked and laughed and shared ideas with thousands of people as friend, mother, teacher, mentor. She had written letters, scrubbed floors, dried tears, wrapped and unwrapped presents, picked flowers, baked pies, argued, danced, slept, wept - experienced that full range of what life has to offer. Her conclusion?
Tempus does not fugit.
Here's what she told the students that day:
"Time is not cruel. Given the good luck of a long healthy life, as most of us have, we have plenty. Plenty of time. We have time to try our new selves. Time to experiment. Time to dream and drift. Time even to waste. Fallow time. Shallow time.
"We'll have good years and bad years. And we can afford both. Every hour will not be filled with meaning and accomplishment as the world measures such things but there will be compensating hours so rich, so full, so humanly satisfying that we will become partners with time and not victims of it."
5.5 In conclusion - travel revisited
Our short trip occasioned this revisiting of an author's work, and a focus on Shields' contemplation of time, in fiction and nonfiction. It brings me back to the two first points above, on travel. Callard's essay inspired many responses, among which is Ross Douthat's opinion piece "The Case for Tourism". At one point, his argument echoes Cowen's "travel makes you a better reader". He writes:
The longtime reader of Jane Austen who wanders the grounds of a Georgian mansion, the history buff who touches the crumbling stones of Hadrian’s Wall, the parent who has read “The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck” a hundred times but now stands in Beatrix Potter’s rain-drenched garden — all of these travelers are enjoying an extension of their education, a deepening of their knowledge (...).
All that being said, Happy Friday!