Essays in Idleness

There is a wild, strange, exhilaration at the appearance of first snow; that generous Christmas feeling, and the glory of boots and greatcoats. Soon we will be skating and sliding. An end has been announced to autumn; the old year will be frozen out.

Rising all the way from the street, to my altitude in the High Doganate, I hear one of my neighbours cussing, and a fine old-fashioned car that chokes and won’t start.

In these parts there is relief from the anticipated “northern monsoon,” as I call it; for most years we have cold rain and drizzle through the month of November. But ho: the sky had some better reason to be overcast this year. Let it fill our streets with promise. Let it halt traffic for a moment of peace.

Gently falling snow, on battlefields and historical places, or on the receding memory of them — and now, this grace returns upon us. Again the world is being cleaned, the stage purified for the next acts and scenes in our play. A curtain of snow has deleted my view across the Lake, and Humber Bay. By God’s grace, across the water, the highrise settlement of Mimico has disappeared. Only the near neighbourhood is visible, the roofs white-on-white, against the white background. A gull cries, and in the echo Hilda Doolittle: “The walls do not fall.”

It is Armistice Day; our poppies are all fastened. The cannon will sound, in the inaudible distance; our clocks will soundlessly strike eleven. For a moment, perhaps, the dead look down upon their children, or upon the children they never had. The stillness binds us all together, beinglessly.

Thirty years ago the Berlin Wall fell. Of course I remember the occasion. It was like first snow. All history was being obscured by it. There was wild surmise in the offices of the Idler magazine, where I then worked; we gathered round a banner headline in the New York Times. What to make of this?

Was the monstrosity of Leninism actually collapsing, the Iron Curtain crashing down? Were the hundred million slaves of Communism suddenly walking free? Nay two, three, four hundred millions? It was a joyous occasion, yet too, a hollow one. For we had done nothing.

Had my generation escaped a Third vast war, that would have followed naturally upon the First and the Second? Were we really excused, so easily, from the horrors which had engulfed my father’s generation, and that of his father? Had we proved, somehow, not worth killing in a great cause?

Were all wars over? Was this “the end of history” as enthusiasts proclaimed? Were we the first of many generations, who would endure the unending boredom of peace?

But in moments history was starting up again, to our equally hollow disappointment.

The world is like that; we should have known. “Peace on Earth” doesn’t happen, except in the heart of a mystery religion, whose partisans fade away. The guns will blaze anew, or perhaps they will be lasers. The bodies will again be frozen, into the ice of time. And as it melts, the siren of Utopia will be heard, to signal the approach of fresh conflicts. Again, the war cry, the demand now for a Green Paradise on Earth — another murderous try at socialism.

Men fail — to learn the mystery of acceptance, the beauty of what they have. The soldiers will ready for battle again. Let the optimists despair.

And here we are, nearly twenty years into a new, violent century. The armies have reformed, into a “new world order.” Think of the armistices to come. And the snows will come, and with the snows, the silence.