Village Squire, 1979-05, Page 6or Italians or Spaniards, we're offending against the very basics
of our identity as a nation. We're a northern people.
"This has been the line since the beginning, I think, conquest:
the conquest of nature. Hell you can't conquer the northern
climate, you can't. You've got to learn to co-operate. As we're
beginning to understand now. I think the youngsters, the new
generations are beginning to come to grips with this and to
realize 'The joy of winter.' "
We've also got to realize, he says, the dimensions of this
country. Canada isn't one town or city, but the endless acres,
mile upon mile in the north and west. He knows the country
better from the air than the ground he says and when he travels
over the prairies in summer with the occasional slough it makes
it look like a kitchen floor that has just been scrubbed and the
odd puddle of water is still laying on it. "It's grand and glorious
but it's a hell of a lot bigger than any individual Canadian or
combination of Canadians."
The Russians, he says, came to grips with their northern
nation with its vastness a long time ago and they call it "mother
Russia." "The country is greater than the sum of the individuals
that live in it and until we can say without giggling "Mother
Canada" we don't know what we're living in: the second
greatest national land mass in the world, three-fifths of all the
fresh water in the world: those are mere statistics, but come to
grips with these statistics, look at it, see it, it's staggering and
beautiful and horrible and frightening and it will continue to
frighten us until we accept that we are tenants, not owners."
When the Russian peasant used to talk of Mother Russia, he
says there was a tenderness involved: there was no attempt to
conquer her but to love her, live with her, understand her. He
agrees that Canadians may not have lived close to the land, long
enough to develop a closeness to the soil. He says he can see
travelling across Canada the older sections of the country like the
Maritimes and Quebec have a greater sophistication in dealing
with the history of the land. Quebec literature has a greater
maturity from being 300-400 years on the land.
He isn't so happy with the literature of Ontario and the West.
"I'm truly appalled at much -touted books that are coming out of
the West, and the East for a matter of fact. This tendency to
brooding about the lint in one's navel. It's that constant whining,
looking for identity. The catch phrase of the sixties in Canada
was certainly "the search for national identity". The
catch -phrase of the seventies is the search for national unity, and
as long as you're hunting for it you're bloody well not going to
find it. You won't find either of these things until you stop
hunting for it and realize that that's where you are."
He quotes Abraham Lincoln and his phrase about not being
able to know where your going until you know where you've
been. Geneology works in well with this, he says in that
Canadians are now going back beyond the place where their
ancestors came off the boat to look to their European roots to see
how they have been shaped by the roots.
This interest in keeping the past a reality for the people of
today, he says, is what has lead him to become involved in
battles to save old buildings in the city of London. A city should
have a continuity of architecture, he says. It should have
buildings from different periods to show that history is not a
static process but is in constant change. "Unless we have that, if
we tear down every monument, every milestone along the road
we're going to end up with a bunch of square glass boxes and our
children are going to come into the world with the impression
that that's all there ever was."
There was a time, he says, when as a boy he could walk
through downtown London and trace the history of the city in less
than a mile. You could go right from 1827 and the old grammar
school which was the first court house, through the rebellion of
1837 and so on through history. The Americans are much farther
ahead of Canada in preserving the reality of their history, he says
particularly in Philadelphia and New Orleans.
He says by the time he was 14 he made a decision that London
was to be his social laboratory and it's worked out that way. In a
community like that over 100 or 150 years of history and you've
4 Village Squire, May 1979
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