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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Wind gusts up to 45 km/h are making the temperature feel like -26°C. Driving along the Appleton Side Road earlier today would have been tolerable had not the wind irreligiously blown scours of blustery snow from the adjacent stubbled field across what might otherwise have been clear, dry pavement but which now were parallel arctic rivers of packed and hardened snow. Nonetheless I refused to abandon my Canadian resolve, a pertinacity to the erstwhile familiarity of childhood and teenage years, building snowmen and tobogganing, skating the Rideau Canal, skiing Mount Temple, bravely succumbing to its restraint, its modification, oppression and opportunities, to winter.
Almonte, Ontario
February 6, 2026
Dear Reader,
Today – a dismal winter day – I obliged myself as usual to go for a drive in my automobile. Initially I was hesitant, given the dull weather and the forecast for snow. But I persisted. I was pensive – even remorseful – so I had a lot to consider. I was feeling sorry for myself, off the map. I summarily pondered past friendships and acquaintances, including those that one might romanticize with love and affection, feelings that I once had for others; but I quickly succeeded to translate the ambience to displeasure. It is, I find, relatively easy to denigrate past relationships that have dissolved. There is psychiatric recommendation to do so, “Let bygones be bygones!” Nonetheless it is more abrupt than I prefer. Which perhaps explains why I lingered upon the subject, as though there were some recipe to revive the nutrition. Yet once I convinced myself of the impropriety of the relationship, I fell upon it with a thud.
Though I don’t now qualify – nor indeed have I ever qualified – as a regular at a coffee shop, I recall my favourite hangouts. My introduction to roasted coffee beans began when I learned of cappuccino. It was 62 years ago. My family – parents, sister and I – were staying at a hotel on the Italian riviera on the Mediterranean. As my sister and I passed through the lobby on the first morning en route to the beach we stopped at the bar where we seated ourselves and asked for a coffee. The bartender (or, now, barista) asked whether we’d like a cappuccino. I had never had a cappuccino. In fact at that point – in my 16th year of age – I seldom drank coffee of any description. So we ordered one each. The espresso must have hit me. I was smitten for life. Now whenever I attend a coffee shop it is always a “double espresso” – which invariably the barista informs me is already doubled so I must in turn ask for a quadruple to overcome any misunderstanding. It has become a predictable and repetitive – and somewhat flat – crosstalk.