February 16, 2026
Wakefield, QC

Hello, Bill!

I’m not sure but pretty sure that you entertained us by playing the piano at the Ottawa New Edinburg sailing and tennis club. The year was 1974. We all met you through Jane Davis I seem to remember. After hours at the club we would close the doors and you would start banging away on the piano found in the great room upstairs. If this is in fact you, I wish to thank you for many late night hours of entertainment. I know you moved to Almonte, and had a very successful practice.

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AI capabilities in recent months have leapt in bounds, and many theoretical risks that were associated with it before, such as whether it could be used for cyberattacks or to generate pathogens, have happened in the past year, Yoshua Bengio, scientific director at the Mila Quebec AI Institute, told Al Jazeera.

Reading the news today I was introduced to the name Claude, a “large language model developed by Anthropic” in the business of Artificial Intelligence (AI). I am assuming Claude is a friend of my acquaintance Hal at ChatGPT.

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On a day such as this when the sky is an unobstructed azure dome, the sunshine is dazzling, the white layer of snow is a shining desert, the temperature is bordering freezing, a Saturday, Valentine’s Day, the weekend preceding the third Monday in February (Family Day for AB, BC, NB, ON, SK, Islander Day for PEI, Louis Riel Day for MB and Nova Scotia Heritage Day for NS), there is little to be done to improve the appeal of the moment; other, that is, than to enjoy the small pleasures of life.

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Sansculottism refers to the extreme republican principles, practices, and radical ideology of the sans-culottes, the working-class revolutionaries in the French Revolution. Characterized by advocacy for social equality, direct democracy, and price controls, it embodied a, “without breeches” radicalism aimed at destroying the influence of the monarchy and aristocracy.

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There are so many oddities today that I wondered whether I may have inadvertently consumed some drug which – not unlike the romanticized addiction of Sherlock Holmes – had transferred me to another atmosphere of unqualified pleasure and comfort. Even, for example, a piece I happily listened to on CBC FM radio perfectly finalized the recording precisely as I was obliged to stop at a traffic light when adjoining March Road. Chance? Of course! But nonetheless a notable one, and a pleasing fortuity whatever you may say.

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Every day is a creation, more often than not an unintentional but nonetheless unquestionable rendition of what we see and feel. The Universe is ultimately personal. Philosophically it is our day. Each of us – as an individual – will create his own eclectic museum of art. If we choose not to portray the fabrication with oil paint, words, music or dance – or through any other model  – we are nevertheless our own artistic vehicle of delivery, the blank canvas on which we portray our singular though unwitting depiction of the day.  And every day is a creation, an inescapable alignment with newness and discovery.  We prepare ourselves in the morning not unlike an actor seated before a mirror in his dressing room. Then apply the costume. And finally execute the performance. Even without design or formation there is conception, spawning thought and reaction into the Universe.

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There’s a narrow thread between wisdom and sharpness in everyday business matters. Yet as priggish as they are, curiously we learn the guiding rules at a young age.  Probably because a prepubescent softball game harbours the identical rivalry and native depravity that unwittingly invades and threatens adulthood. The equally unsatisfactory conclusion is that age is not of itself a limitation or improvement of one’s childish behaviour. Frankly I am inclined instead to presume that the character of a man is made from those early days on the pitch. The transition of time only perfects or modifies the initial allure.

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Lately my already limited sphere of activity has been encumbered waiting. Though I am willing, dear Reader, to relate the dreary detail of what it is that I await, it is irrelevant to the toxicity of the psychosis. The very implication of waiting – that is, a mere postponement – is, one might reasonably conclude, enough to assuage one’s anxiety. And yet it is not. The desire to complete the ambition far outweighs the poetry of idle submission to the weight of minutes, hours, days, weeks or months. Indeed the knowledge of its foreseeability only stimulates the pressure surrounding the deferral.

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Ganymede
1 Greek mythology a Trojan youth who was so beautiful that he was carried off to be Zeus’ cup-bearer.
2 Astronomy one of the Galilean moons of Jupiter, the seventh-closest satellite to the planet and the largest satellite in the solar system (diameter 5,262 km).

It’s Sunday afternoon mid-winter in Canada under a brilliantly blue and glimmering sunny sky and as vividly cold. Rumour has it that the traditional new year Super Bowl football match is scheduled on television today. We do not have a television.  We abandoned it for our laptop computers instead – though, for my part, I haven’t any ambition or expectation to submit to such a boob-tube production. Competitive sport has never been an amusement of mine. I am as usual riveted to my desk overlooking the white frozen fields and iced upriver view.

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