Reasons I Am Happy To Be Canadian

It’s Canada Day, you guys, so here is the requisite Canada Day post. Are ya ready? Well, I hope you are!

First things first. We have the national anthem sung by babies. Get your aww ready because this is sure to melt you into a puddle. Unless you have a heart of stone, that is.

2. Canada is beautiful. Specifically British Columbia.

3. We have amazing food. If you ever come to Vancouver, take time to visit different restaurants and experience the effect of diversity on food.

4. Diversity.  This is, perhaps, the best part about being Canadian. There are so many ethnicities and so many cultures to learn from, to experience that it’s like you’re traveling all over the world. I love that.

5. We are passionate about hockey. Like, really really passionate. Here’s proof:

6. And finally, we have really good writers. I give you:

“If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next—if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions—you’d be doomed. You’d be ruined as God. You’d be a stone. You’d never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You’d never love anyone, ever again. You’d never dare to.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

“It is true that those we meet can change us, sometimes so profoundly that we are not the same afterwards, even unto our names.”
— Yann Martel (Life of Pi)

“Each man creates god in his own image.”
— Mordecai Richler (Son of a Smaller Hero)

“It appeared painful to regrow a set of hands, but I can hardly blame her for dabbling in street magic. Anyone can see she’s addicted to being whole.”
— Robert Paul Weston (Dust City)

“This memory, this pretty little stone, I examine it with my eyes closed tight. Turn it over in my fingers.”
— Joseph Boyden (Three Day Road)

“Often she dreamt she had two wings, and one was frightened, and one was happy.”
— Erin Bow (Plain Kate)

“And then I felt sad because I realized that once people are broken in certain ways, they can’t ever be fixed, and this is something nobody ever tells you when you are young and it never fails to surprise you as you grow older as you see the people in your life break one by one. You wonder when your turn is going to be, or if it’s already happened.”
— Douglas Coupland (Life After God)

“Read as widely and as deeply as you can. You have to be a reader before you can be a writer.”
— Y.S. Lee

 

Everybody Needs a Laugh.

“I am like a room where things once happened and now nothing does, except the pollen of the weeds that grow up outside the window, blowing in as dust across the floor.”

-:- The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood -:-

First Paragraphs (of books)

“It took me a long time and most of the world to learn what I know about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortured. I realised, somehow, through the screaming of my mind, that even in that shackled, bloody helplessness, I was still free: free to hate the men who were torturing me, or to forgive them. It doesn’t sound like much, I know. But in the flinch and bite of the chain, when it’s all you’ve got, that freedom is a universe of possibility. And the choice you make between hating and forgiving, can become the story of your life.”
— Gregory David Roberts (Shantaram)

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead – Tom Stoppard (Not Exactly a Review)

I read this play for a class that dealt with a genre of Contemporary British Literature, which in this case was drama. I mentioned this play in my last review and it occurred to me that a lot of people might not be familiar with it. I know I certainly had no idea about it until I took the class.

Anyway, if you’re into Shakespeare, you might recognize Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. They had very minor roles in Hamlet in which they ended up dying. Tom Stoppard’s play plucks them out of their native habitat and gives them a stage all to themselves with the condition of their set mortality – a death they are helpless but to repeat over and over again. The play deals with existentialism, questioning mortality as it pertains to fictional characters (whose greatest desires might be to be real) and talks about freedom to make your own decisions and act in the manner you want to even though you have a set destiny. Sort of like all roads lead to Rome – you can either take the scenic route or not.

The reason I am sharing this with you guys is because there are several dialogues from the play that struck me as quite profound the first time I read it and this feeling was reiterated the next few times I did again. I love the language of the play – the thoughts expressed. And I have a feeling some of you will appreciate Stoppard’s genius as well.

-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-

“We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered.”

-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-

“Whatever became of the moment
when one first knew about death? There must have been one, a moment, in childhood, when it first occurred to you that you don’t go on forever. It must have been shattering, stamped into one’s memory. And yet I can’t remember it. It never occurred to me at all. We must be born with an intuition of mortality. Before we know the word for it, before we know that there are words,out we come, bloodied and squalling…with the knowledge that for all the points of the compass, there’s only one direction
and time is its only measure.”

-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-

“Rosencrantz: I don’t believe in it anyway.
Guildenstern: What?
Rosencrantz: England.
Guildenstern: Just a conspiracy of cartographers, then? “

-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-

“Wheels have been set in motion, and they have their own pace, to which we are…condemned. Each move is dictated by the previous one – that is the meaning of order. If we start being arbitrary it’ll just be a shambles: at least, let us hope so. Because if we happened, just happened to discover, or even suspect, that our spontaneity was part of their order, we’d know that we were lost. A Chinaman of the T’ang Dynasty – and, by which definition, a philosopher – dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher. Envy him; his two-fold security. “

-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-

“There we were – demented children mincing about in clothes that no one ever wore, speaking as no man ever spoke, swearing love in wigs and rhymed couplets, killing each other with wooden swords, hollow protestations of faith hurled after empty promises of vengeance – and every gesture, every pose, vanishing into the thin unpopulated air. We ransomed our dignity to the clouds, and the uncomprehending birds listened. Don’t you see?! We’re actors – we’re the opposite of people!”

 

-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-:-