Commentary
The Canadian dream of paradise surely includes a book on the dock in the dog days of summer. Or possibly on the screened-in cottage porch given the Canadian deer fly’s dream of tearing out a ragged chunk of your meat, inspiring the further Canadian dream of a dragonfly’s jaws piercing the absconding miscreant with an audible crunch. Paradise Regained.
Perhaps a dissenting voice will be heard objecting that the whole cottage/book thing is the dream only of a certain slice of the populace. And I do worry that it’s a dwindling slice. For instance Jonathan Kay, a brave dissenting urban leftist literary snob, just forwarded a tweet (already you feel the great books turning over in their dusty mausolibraries) of a Toronto bookstore’s display of “BOOKS WE PRETEND WE’VE READ”) and I found myself wishing we still did….