In the City

A fine, wet night

I'm in Montreal tonight, on my own.  I came to town with the Infanta but she jettisoned me ASAP in favor of one of her friends here.  Really, I don't mind.  It takes me back, being here on my own as I was so often in college and law school days.

I bought a ticket to The Martian and watched it in one of Montreal's best movie theaters.  I liked the film a lot - for the story, the acting, the production values and also because it was born of a book originally self-published by Andy Weir.  Let us never forget the great lesson taught by Peter Gabriel: "all of the buildings, all of the cars, were once just a dream in somebody's head."

Andy Weir had an idea, realized it, next thing you know Matt Damon and Kristen Wiig are learning their lines and I'm leaning back in a comfy seat half way up.  It's almost as miraculous as the story of The Martian itself.

The film ended just before 10 PM and in the two and a half hours that I was in the theater the temperature had dropped about twenty degrees. The odd-for-November warm wind that buffeted the car on the way into town had changed. It was appropriately cold and the rain had turned to fat snow snow flakes.  I walked home to Whusband's apartment in the McGill Ghetto through the dark McGill campus. I had an umbrella as a shield from the wind and wet snow, which was helpful as I was wrongly dressed. I didn't mind that either, however.  It was just the right amount of wind and cold: bracing without being freezing.  I don't have to go anywhere tonight and as Adam Gopnik once told me, Montreal is most itself in the cold.  The picture above is one that I snapped of St. Catherine Street just after I exited the drugstore across the street from the theater: Montreal looking fine with rain slicked pavements and Christmas decor.

This isn't a real snowstorm, but it has me thinking of the ones I lived through here all those years ago. In student days I could get where ever I had to go on foot.  I didn't have to worry much about snow.  A hush would come over the city on those snowstorm nights - only taxis still out and about in the small hours. I loved to watch the snow pile up on those nights, falling fast passed the yellow streetlights...

I have been, unaccountably, in a bad mood for the last few days.  Thanksgiving was OK but I was irritated, mostly with myself but with others too. This night and this cold wind seem to have blown that feeling away.

My Letter From Robertson Davies

I know at least one thing that Robertson Davies did on June 9, 1987.  He wrote (well, probably dictated) a letter to me.   

I have been moving pictures around these last months and this letter, in the cheap plastic box frame in which it has been housed for 25 years, just came up for rotation.  I re-read it yesterday and got quite choked up.  Davies once said: "A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight."   Likewise, a great letter.  

I was thrilled at 22 to have a little notice from the great man.  At 47 I am touched by the kindness he showed to an earnest and rather ridiculous 22-year-old.

I can't remember just what I wrote but his response refreshes my recollection. I finished my B.A. at old McGill in the Spring of 1987.  My "Honours" essay (the scare quotes are for the English/Canadian spelling and for what I imagine was the quality of the essay) was about the way Davies' sets up his characters for their punishments or rewards in his famous Deptford Trilogy.  (Goodness and badness are complicated matters there - much to do with spiritual courage and psychological honesty rather than any outward do-goodism).   I felt deep sympathy for Davies' worldview (and still do). When I finished the paper, I was compelled to write to him about it and to tell him how much his books had meant to me.  Good, kind, wise man that he was - I found this in my Schenectady mail box a few weeks later.  

He is responding in the first paragraph to what I said to him about my feeling for McGill.  I went there following a freshman year at the State University of New York at Binghamton.  I loved McGill - an English Colonial dream of a university - from the moment I set foot on the campus.  Binghamton was an important experience too, but a (foolishly) romantic girl who thought college = Brideshead Revisted could not find a lot to love in the Rockefellerish prevent-a-student-riot aesthetic of the buildings and the pragmatic good-value-seeking student body.  Not a clock tower or a grey stone in sight and no one who would have wanted to pay for one even if available.  (Many very bright people were there, though, and I know that is really more important but, as noted, I was a little deluded).

Robertson Davies died in 1995 and it seems to me that he is fading (unjustly) into obscurity.  I re-read his best and most famous book, Fifth Business, this summer.  His observation about the benefit of a lifelong involvement with a good book was wholly borne out.  
After I re-read the letter yesterday, this relic from a the pre-internet age, it seemed to me almost a duty to share it.  I hope you will like it too.

As a few of your regular-stoppers-by know, I have been engaged for years in writing a book of my own.  (Coming January 2013-Watch this space!).  A central character is my own Professor Davies - Morgan Davies, that is, a time traveler with a biography wholly different from R. Davies, but very much inspired by his example - and looking just like him.