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Preface to “The Bush Garden”
What follows is a retrospective collection of some of my writings on Canadian culture, mainly literature, extending over a period of nearly thirty years. It will perhaps be easiest to introduce them personally, as episodes in a writing career which has been mainly concerned with world literature and has addressed an international reading public, and […]
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Conclusion to a Literary History of Canada
Some years ago, a group of editors met to draw up the first tentative plans for a history of English Canadian literature. What we then dreamed of is substantially what we have got, changed very little in essentials. I expressed at the time the hope that such a book would help to broaden the inductive […]
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Banquet Speech
Albert Camus’ speech at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm, December 10, 1957 (Translation) In receiving the distinction with which your free Academy has so generously honoured me, my gratitude has been profound, particularly when I consider the extent to which this recompense has surpassed my personal merits. Every man, and for […]
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The Myth of Sisyphus
The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor. If one believes Homer, Sisyphus was the wisest and most prudent […]
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Eleanor of Aquitaine
Born of noble parents in France in 1122, Eleanor of Aquitaine was an attractive and charming child. She was born into a heritage of promiscuity; a family notorious for its wanton ways. Eleanor’s father, Duke William X of Aquitaine, was one of the wealthiest men in France and even owned more land than the king. […]
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Cave Man Principle
Cave Man Principle by Michio Kaku Why did these predictions fail to materialize?[…new media technologies wiping out current media technologies…] I conjecture that people largely rejected these advances because of what I call the Cave Man (or Cave Woman) Principle. Genetic and fossil evidence indicates that modern humans, who looked just like us, emerged from […]
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A Modest Proposal
For Preventing The Children of Poor People in Ireland From Being Aburden to Their Parents or Country, and For Making Them Beneficial to The Public By Jonathan Swift (1729) It is a melancholy object to those who walk through this great town or travel in the country, when they see the streets, the roads, and […]
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The Embassy of Death
The Embassy of Death: An Essay on Hamlet G. WILSON KNIGHT It is usual in Shakespeare’s plays for the main theme to be reflected in subsidiary incidents, persons, and detailed suggestion throughout. Now the theme of Hamlet is death. Life that is bound for the disintegration of the grave, love that does not survive the […]