Last evening we went to bed early enough that the next morning Nature’s signal to awaken and arise shortly after 8:00 am was tolerably well received. I twisted about in bed for another moment, attempting to inflict a chiropractic crack in my lower spine, while recalling the weather forecast that today would be the last for at least the next several days that we could bicycle on dry roads. Environment Canada had issued a serious Snowfall warning for Eastern Lanark County.
The wall of the staircase, up which I had watched the light of his candle gradually climb, was long ago demolished. And in myself, too, many things have perished which, I imagined, would last for ever, and new structures have arisen, giving birth to new sorrows and new joys which in those days I could not have foreseen, just as now the old are difficult of comprehension.
Excerpt From
Proust, Marcel “Swann’s Way”
Cloistered as we are by force of COVID restrictions, the bleak mild winter nonetheless sanctioned our ritual bicycle ride again this morning. Every day this serendipity occurs we predict it will be our last. But the “depths of winter” have yet to overtake. Accordingly we layered ourselves in cotton and sheepskin and headed out. Our venture today was along Country Street across Hwy#29 onto the Rae Road then winding back through town and home. Whether by ineluctability, acquiescence or fact it doesn’t seem to matter that the view of the snowy fields is distinct from the view of a sandy beach. Indeed there’s something captivating about the complexity of a field as opposed to the banality of an ocean.
By an odd comparison and perhaps shamefully I respond more acutely to a visit to the car repair shop than to my family physician. The reaction naturally speaks to the no doubt fleeting though momentarily surpassing penetration of my car to that of my corpus. The damaged goods of my body are predominantly irreversible whereas the maintenance of my vehicle admits to predictable optimism and hopeful triumph. Incited by this consummate seduction I awoke very early this morning, drove to the dealership and was the first in line for what I reckon was equivalent to a psychiatric appointment with the service department under the auspices of the assiduous Shop Foreman Wayde Kingsley at Lincoln Heights Ford, Richmond Road, Ottawa.
A glorious morning! There isn’t a clear sky nor dazzling sunshine, just a moody grey dome and a raw misty atmosphere. But I sensed something awesome. My exuberance was a whispered one, no more deserving than the triumph of a drunk having withstood excessive temptation. In point of fact my behaviour last evening was not entirely abstemious – I ended getting both feet into a jar of organic peanut butter. With a spoon. Sans bread. Peanut butter is a constant snare for me. I reckon that peanut butter – like beer – is loaded with nutrition, how else to explain its beguilement? It always leaves me replete and regretful. Yet after this morning’s 10 km bicycle ride – a venture in January in Canada I record for historical purposes alone – my penance has been performed.
Ball of Confusion
What an intrusion
A rally, a riot, a deadly plot
Attacking mob of kilowatts
Four years ago President Donald J. Trump of the United States of America began the studied and constant touting of an accusation of “fake news” from the mainstream media. Initially his incrimination was dismissed as the sour grapes of a disgruntled politician – who uncommonly for someone his age had a grip upon social media, Twitter in particular. The charge has since transmuted to a mantra of the very radical element he appeared to fumigate against in others. Trump’s Twitter account has since been removed indefinitely.
“The fault I find with our journalism is that it forces us to take an interest in some fresh triviality or other every day, whereas only three or four books in a lifetime give us anything that is of real importance. In that way we should arrive at the right proportion between information and publicity. Never did I find in that coarse bottle anything but ill-humour, boorishness, and folly.”
Excerpt From
Proust, Marcel “Swann’s Way”
But then, even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or the record of a will; our social personality is created by the thoughts of other people. Even the simple act which we describe as “seeing some one we know” is, to some extent, an intellectual process. We pack the physical outline of the creature we see with all the ideas we have already formed about him, and in the complete picture of him which we compose in our minds those ideas have certainly the principal place. In the end they come to fill out so completely the curve of his cheeks, to follow so exactly the line of his nose, they blend so harmoniously in the sound of his voice that these seem to be no more than a transparent envelope, so that each time we see the face or hear the voice it is our own ideas of him which we recognise and to which we listen.
Excerpt From
Proust, Marcel “Swann’s Way”
The diaphanous air was crystal clear this morning when I launched my constitutional bicycle ride. Today marks the end of the first week of the New Year – and the end of a raucous political week in the United States of America. No doubt many people are worn to a frazzle by COVID isolation, Trump’s buffoonery and the prospect of more winter. My bicycle ride by comparison was ideal.
Hawley harshly criticized the decision, saying it “represents the end of the conservative legal movement.“
What more than anything gobsmacks me after yesterday’s storming of the Capitol building by Trump supporters is that it was based upon both factual and legal lies; viz., there was no voter suppression in the presidential election and there is no right of the vice-president to change the outcome. The interlopers had only moments earlier been prompted to do their dirty work by President Donald J. Trump who repeated both lies. The President’s henchmen Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley – both lawyers – reiterated their own version of identical lies in the Senate. Nor did they change their tune even after the mob was forced out of the Senate and the Senators reconvened.