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For the sake of being relatively cyber-protective, and for many other reasons, I will have to navigate smoothly between words describing recent experiences—having already written an account for my relatives and friends, I have been running out of creativity.
One of someone’s thoughts, perhaps written in a moment of fatigue, but later corroborated by others’ expressed feelings, confirmed what I’ve been guessing all along, since I could write little stories, out of thin air, to friends and relatives, or anybody who’s patient to listen—that I love telling stories. But this so-called self-discovery has some implications; for one, I will have to spend time, as soon as I settle down, on doing research, so I can write about what seems to pique my imagination, or goad my present or past obsessions—more about culture, or cultures, it seems.
It’s interesting that John Ralston Saul, our former governor general’s husband, whose some thoughts were quite recently written somewhere (“A fair country: telling truths about Canada“), mentioned something about Canada’s two competing underlying cultural values: one that is coming from its distant, indigenous past; the other, post-1867, colonial and imperial, seems to have prevailed, or won, and created our present institutions. Now, someone from the Canadian elites is saying something that needs to be elaborated in our future history books. What does that mean? What can we do to reconnect with the spirit of the pre-1867 institutions that were more accommodating to cultural and ethnic diversity than the present institutions? We need to distance ourselves from the myth of so-called two founding European cultures…But how can that be done?
The more I read scholarly papers, especially those written by professors of humanities, the more I realize that people such as myself, that is, people coming from another linguistic and cultural background, will never be able to catch up, no matter what, with well-educated native English writers. It is an insurmountable handicap, no matter how hard some psychologists would try to find some sort of feel-good theoretical frame.
It looks like it paid off to spend a whole term on sweating a cultural essay about the Romanian alphabet; but the news only reopened a window through which I could see some hard work ahead: rephrasing ideas, smithing words, giving birth to more elaborate sentences (what other metaphor can one think of when writing is such a painstaking effort?) and rechecking bibliographic references (mostly, citations). I’ll see.
What I found scary was when a word, or group of words, was used to comprise the notion of “one year;” whoever will have read this message, and is in the business of librarianship, will understand quite well what I mean.
