One of the principal thrills of undergraduate study is the titillation of pushing the envelope – of becoming learned with one foot still planted firmly in the realm of childish bashfulness. I recall, for instance, school newspapers in undergrad that looked like their mainstream counterparts, but which featured foul language and spoke of lascivious happenings. The impressionable eighteen-year-old...
My father, a native New Yorker was particularly affected when the Twin Towers fell. In December of 2001, on the way home from one of our many trips visiting extended family, we detoured past Ground Zero. Three months had elapsed, yet small fires continued to smolder. Upon returning home, my father’s psyche collapsed. He developed migraines that have been with him since. To escape the ceaseless...
Human beings are knowledge-seeking creatures. Evolutionary biologists explain this phenomenon as associated with our awareness of our own vulnerability and mortality. As such, people are sensitive to the amount of information that they possess or lack at any given moment. Intriguingly, we are bothered by either knowing too much or too little. On the one hand, we risk misapprehending the risks in...
Elevation and depth in the world serve to complicate one’s wish to move in a linear manner. Yet life is a non-linear journey, and so we find beauty in things that rise and tower above us, and mystery in the incalculable things that plunge below us. There is value, it seems, in viewing things in a complex manner. On the other hand, when we eliminate the complexity of our world, as totalitarians...
There is a configuration of identity in our country that is becoming increasingly common with each passing day; yet, without a word uttered concerning its existence. It is a form of identity that is poorly understood by those who experience it, as it is true only half of the time. I am describing Canadians whose identities as ‘Canadian’ have been only recently conferred. Some of us were born here...
Over the holiday break I had the unique pleasure of reviving a long-dead friendship. My friend and his family live an hour north of Toronto in a cozy, quaint town. Our interactions evolved in the natural way: beginning with typical, childish generalities before maturing and taking on an idiosyncratic friendship replete with ridiculous noise-gags and inside jokes. There was no predicting the...
A Reflection In mid-November 2017, I was at my friend’s apartment in Manhattan’s East Village. The path that had brought him to that apartment at the corner of 13th and 3rd Avenues was, to my outside view, flawlessly executed. A gifted musician and instrumentalist from early childhood, he and his piano, microphone, saxophone, and guitar were inseparable. In 2013, his passion became a bona fide...