Walking in Toronto

    Hello, everyone.  Sorry for my long absence.  I've been very busy lately. Due to an unexpected move, I had to get rid of most of my book collection.  I must have given away three thousand books or more.  But I made quite a few people happy. I once thought that I could never get rid of so many books. But, once they were gone, it felt nice to live in a new apartment that was free of clutter. 

     My, how technology has changed things. The theological classics that formed the backbone of my library are now available online for free. Other books I can purchase and download on my computer and my IPad.  So, nothing is really lost. Some people may lament the loss of the printed page, but I actually enjoy reading books on my computer.  Still, it does feel a bit strange sometimes.

     I've been tired lately, but now that I've had some rest, I've returned to one of my favourite pastimes: walking.  Walking is great exercise, and it also is not so strenuous that it prevents me from enjoying the scenery and reflecting on what I see.

    Toronto is such a huge city, but there is so much of interest to see.  From the skyscrapers of the Business District, to the older neighbourhoods with their charming houses and tree-lined streets, to the parks and the museums and art galleries: there is something to enchant even the most jaded.  Toronto is not a world-class metropolis such as London or Paris or New York, but it has a mystique and a romance of its own that never cease to move me.

     When I walk, I often reflect on the inevitable passage of time.  Areas that were run-down in my early youth have now been rebuilt.  Dilapidated houses and buildings have been torn down, to be replaced by towers of gleaming glass and steel.  The skyline has changed dramatically, and now resembles the skyline of some city of futuristic dreams, a city of the science fiction worlds of my boyhood.  But much has remained of the old Toronto.  I can still see the Gothic architecture of Victorian Toronto in some areas, albeit surrounded and dwarfed by the buildings of the twentieth and twenty-first century.  The past, the present and the future are all together, sometimes in one small part of the city.

      There is so much to captivate.  The parks offer a refuge from the buildings and the traffic.  High Park is like a rural oasis, unchanged since it was first created.  I have wandered through the trees, and felt the wonder that forests always give me.  I have stood on the shores of Lake Ontario,  and listened to the lapping of the waves on the pebble-strewn beaches while looking across the vast expanse of water.

      When I walk, it's as if I always find new worlds of wonder. I feel like a traveller to hitherto unexplored lands, while new horizons constantly beckon to me.

       And often I wonder about the people I see.  I see crowds of young people emerging from a bar or a party, laughing together as if none of them had any cares.  I see couples  holding hands, lost in the enchantment of first love.  I see families with children, and go back to my childhood, when my parents took me for walks, and the sights of the city were something new and strange to me.  I see older people, and I wonder how the passage of time has affected them, since it has affected me so much.  And I see people who must have had dreams like mine, but who have had their dreams crushed for various reasons: derelicts wandering with glassy eyes asking for spare change,  and people broken by drugs, drink or depression who wander alone and bereft of hope.

     I then realize that the true wonder and glory of Toronto, and indeed of any city is the people that dwell in it.  Without people Toronto would only be a shell, a beautiful  and intriguing shell, but a shell nonetheless. Everywhere I go there are buildings and places filled with people.  I will never know all their sorrows and joys.  There are people who have just met and are beginning a lifelong friendship,and there are others who are facing the heartbreak of a final separation.  There are people who are happy and contented, others who are consumed by gnawing worries. In each dwelling that I pass, I wonder about the lives of those who live there. Some must be laughing with their friends, others weeping  in inconsolable grief.  There will be scenes of anger and strife, with shouting words and curses, and there will be scenes of tenderness, where one person consoles another.

     "No man is an island, entire of itself,  every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main..." How true  are the words of John Donne , written almost four centuries ago.  I am no solitary wanderer, adrift on an impersonal sea.  I am connected to all who I see around me, and they are to me.  No grief or joy is alien to me,  no one is truly a stranger to me. And I am not a stranger to them.

       Do they know that? I'm sure some of them do.  But how many of them are wondering what is it all about?  How many of them wonder about the meaning of their lives? How many of them know that they are loved, and know who loves them?

   
   

      

Bertrand Russell and God

   When I was fourteen,  I read the autobiography of Bertrand Russell.  He was my intellectual hero at that time. I had previously read his The Conquest of Happiness.  Later I read some of his more philosophical works.

     Bertrand Russell is widely regarded as the greatest philosopher of the Twentieth Century, and as one of the greatest philosophers of all time.  He was a brilliant mathematician, who, along with Alfred North Whitehead,  laid the foundations for mathematical logic  in the seminal book Principia Mathematica. (No, I haven't read that one. Please don't ask me to read it. After a few glances, I realised that I would have to spend several years studying logic before I could begin to understand it. )  He was also a polished literary stylist, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950. What he is most famous for, perhaps, is his atheism and his criticisms of Christianity, as exemplified is his most famous book, Why I am not a Christian.  During the later part of his long life (he was born in 1872 and died in 1970) he campaigned for nuclear disarmament and against the Vietnam War.

    His autobiography, which was published in three volumes, covers all these topics in detail, along with details about his four marriages and his extramarital affairs.  Pretty heady stuff for a fourteen year old boy!

   But I looked up to him and thought he was right in his rejection of religion.

   Listen to him as he describes what has guided his life: "Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very edge of despair." When I read that, I sensed a kindred soul.

    He grew up, lonely and misunderstood, and I felt his loneliness. His adolescent doubts, written in Greek letters so that his family could not read them, finally resulted in a total rejection of any belief in God by the time he reached eighteen.  I sympathised with him on that issue as well.  I had already told my father when I was thirteen that I did not believe in God.  Thenceforth I had resolved to live life in a universe without God.  I would fill my days with literature and poetry and the thoughts of the great, but that would be all the meaning that I would expect from life.

    But how lonely and unhappy I was! How wrapped up in my own little life!

    And Bertrand Russell did not strike me as a very happy man either.  His first marriage, though it continued for several terrible years, effectively ended when he found out that he no longer loved his wife.  He discovered this while he was riding his bicycle.  My fourteen-year-old self strove to understand what this could possibly mean.  Maybe I still don't understand it now. Later marriages turned out to be as unsuccessful. It was only when he reached his eighties that he found happiness and stability in his fourth marriage.

   There was much in Bertrand Russell's autobiography that my adolescent self could not understand, but as I read all three volumes, I began to feel disillusioned. In spite of his brilliance, I began to realise that he had no more  understanding of life's mysteries than I had.

   In his Free's Man's Worship he wrote about building life on "a firm foundation of unyielding despair".  I could not accept that then, any more than I can accept it now.  If I believed that, I would have to live a life filled with amusements and selfish pursuits, all in a vain effort to not think about the meaninglessness of it all. Life cannot be lived without hope, not real life.

   And he knew that, too. Read what he wrote in one of his letters, written during the First World War: "The centre of me is always and eternally a terrible pain - a curious wild pain - a searching for something beyond what the world contains, something transfigured and infinite - the beatific vision - God - I do not find it, I do not think it is to be found - but the love of it is the love of my life - it's like passionate love for a ghost. At times it fills me with rage, at times with wild despair, it is the source of gentleness and cruelty and work - it fills every passion that I have - it is the actual spring of life within me." What an astonishing statement for someone of his convictions!

    But how true. Mostly true, I would say. The rage and the despair and the cruelty come from resisting the transfigured and infinite: what he also calls the beatific vision. They don't come from the vision itself, certainly not from God, whom he mentions by name. It is interesting to see the contradiction in his life: his whole being is searching for something that he does not believe exists.  How can something that is the love of his life and the spring of life within him not exist?  He was torn in two...like I was.

     I would have to look elsewhere for answers to my deepest yearnings.  It was moving to read the biography of his daughter, Catherine Tait: "My Father, Bertrand Russell."  She was raised up as an atheist, but became a Christian later on in life. She talks about trusting him to God's  care, knowing that God loved him more than she did and would do what was best for him. Much as she loved her father, his answers did not satisfy her either. 

    There was more to life than art and intellectual pursuits, more than even friendship or love. I began to realise that, and after reading Bertrand Russell's autobiography, I put it aside. 

Wonder

                                             

  

     Ever since I was a child, I had a sense of wonder.  I looked up at the stars and wondered about them. When I studied astronomy my wonder increased. To think that the light from the stars had been travelling for years, for decades, for centuries until it reached the earth!  We are looking not at the stars of today, but at the stars of the past.  How vast is the universe! It is beyond our imagination. I would look upwards and marvel at all of it. How vast, how mysterious, how ineffably beautiful!

    I wondered at my own existence. I remember when I was seven or eight, I would lie in my bed and ponder the mystery of me. Is is not strange that I exist! Why did I exist?  Alone at night, I gazed into the darkness and wondered.

     I contemplated the vast ages before me. I read palaeontology books, and marvelled at the prehistoric creatures that walked the earth millions of years ago. Long gone, save for a few scattered bones.  The earth on which I walked was stranger than I had ever thought before. Once much of it was covered with ice.  Before that it was a great jungle.  Before that it was lifeless, and molten.  I memorized the names of the dinosaurs and prehistoric mammals and longed to go to the great museums where I could at least see their bones. 

    I lived in Baffin Island when I was a child. It was very cold and dark for most of the year.  Even in the summer the landscape was silent, no birds, no traffic, only a small village by a fiord, surrounded by mountains. I walked along the treeless tundra between the mountains and fiord, and wondered at the unearthly beauty of this desolate landscape. Unearthly compared to what I had known, yet very earthly. The moss of the tundra was bejewelled with countless flowers, flowers that would only bloom for the two months of the Arctic summer. It was all so strange, yet so compelling to me.

    I read books of science fiction and fantasy and wandered in worlds of wonder.  My reading moved from the sword and planet stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs, to the high fantasy of Tolkien, to the terror of Lovecraft. Each of these authors kept me enthralled. 

    I wondered if life had any meaning. I could not believe that all this beauty happened by chance. Inside myself I felt aspirations towards something greater. Was this all there is? I could never believe that.
    Kant wrote: "Two things inspire me to awe: the starry heavens above and the moral law within." Those were my sentiments exactly. As awesome as those things were, were they not but the signposts to something even greater? The splendour and the strangeness of the universe, the mystery of who we are, was all this something that we were supposed to accept as a brute fact, or did it  not mean something more?
     I wondered at everything, and my heart aspired to something that I could not even conceive.  My feelings of wonder made me search.  I did not know what I sought, but I searched.
     Have you ever wondered?

    

     

The Immortal Alice

  I have so many fond memories of the books that I read in my childhood.  I remember sitting on my chair in my reading spot or lying in bed reading my beloved books.  They opened a gateway to other worlds,  worlds that I have never stopped exploring.
     One of the first of these books was Alice in Wonderland.  Until recently I still possessed the edition that my parents had bought for me.  It was falling apart, so I got rid of it. (Forgive me!)  I still have the first page in my possession.  On it my mother had written: "Beloved book of Martin T. Gamble, 7 years old. Read entirely by him on Sunday, January 10, 1965."  I don't remember much else about that Sunday, but I certainly remember reading that book.
     It was a vivid, yet surreal experience.  I mean, it starts with a young girl sitting beside her sister,who is reading a book,  but then a white rabbit runs by her, exclaims, "Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!" and pulls a watch out of its waistcoat- pocket.  At this point I could have said to myself, "Man! This is too weird for me!", or an equivalent expression more suited to my seven-year-old brain, and tossed the book aside.  I had already read some popular science books.  I knew that rabbits don't speak, don't wear waistcoats, whatever they were, and don't carry watches.
     But I continued.  I was intrigued.  I felt empathy for this young girl, who was probably my own age, and who underwent such harrowing adventures.  Imagine falling down a bottomless rabbit hole, imagine meeting such bizarre creatures.  I acutely remember how bizarre it all was.  But part of the allure of the book was that no matter how strange her adventures were,  I could relate to her. And even though the characters were rather eccentric, to put it mildly,  I felt that they were actual characters. I was enthralled.  I forgot everything until I had finished Alice in Wonderland and its sequel, Through the Looking Glass.
     I possess several annotated versions of Alice.  The annotations are very helpful, but I managed to understand  Alice  without them.   For example, in one chapter there is a reference to treacle. My notes tell me that treacle is British for molasses.  I did not know that then,  but it certainly didn't impair my enjoyment in reading the book.  Are annotations essential to understanding a piece of fiction?  The magnificent illustrations by John Tenniel  helped me far more than any notes could have.  They also managed to convey the splendour and strangeness of Alice's adventures, and formed a perfect complement to the text.
     Lewis Carroll, or Charles Dodgson,  the author of Alice in Wonderland,  taught Mathematics at Oxford University.  Throughout the book there are logical puzzles.  They eluded me then, and I am sure that they would still elude me.  I was not interested in its logical puzzles, but in the its fascinating world and in the sense of something on the horizon, something wonderful and unexpected that kept me reading to the very end.
    It was a memorable Sunday afternoon. That book kindled in me a love for fantasy and science-fiction that has remained with me to this day, and a desire to explore the boundless vistas of the imagination.  Thank you, Lewis Carroll.

Twilight

  My favourite time of the day is, without question, the time after sunset and before nightfall: evening or twilight. (Twilight can also refer to the time just before sunrise,  but I'm hardly ever up that early, so I won't talk about that.)
   It's the time when the day cools down and when the stars begin to appear.  Familiar landscapes assume a mysterious air and  lights turn on in buildings, so that even the drabbest of edifices begin to look like faery palaces,  aglow with lambent lights.  It's as if for a few brief minutes,  two different worlds are intersecting,  one our mundane reality,  and the other a realm of wonders.
    I've experienced twilight in the lakes of Northern Ontario.  It is something to hear the cry of the loon across the stillness of an evening lake,  and to walk through the trees of a darkening forest.  It's in the twilight that I wonder at the immensity of that primeval forest, which stretches from the cities of  Southern Ontario to the frozen desolation of the tundra, hundreds of miles to the north.
    Twilight in the city is something else entirely.  During the day the city is loud and garish and crowded.  At night it can be equally loud,  but often too quiet and dangerous.  The twilight is the best time.  Walking along the streets of a large city in a summer's evening makes me forget the grime of the streets and the heat of the day, and transports me for a little while into a city of enchantment.  I well remember walking along Broadway  during the dusk.  New York City was  then like the fabled cities of the great fantasy epics,  a city of illimitable vistas and marvels.
     Everything assumes different contours in the twilight.  I spoke of the intersection of two different worlds. I don't believe that is just a passing fancy.  I do believe that the evening time foreshadows the transition to another, much greater world.  It is a symbol of the junction of our world and this other world.  That's when things that are familiar become vessels of splendour,  showing glimpses of something far greater than we could ever imagine.
     In the twilight you can reflect on the day that has departed and make plans for the day to come.  What a privilege it is to be able to do that as the sunlight slowly fades,  and  the stars begin to shine in the darkening sky.
     Those are some reasons why I love the twilight. What is your favourite time of the day?

Hello and Bonjour.
     I'm Martin. In this blog I will share my reflections.  I've read quite a lot.  I don't consider myself a particularly profound thinker.  But if you, gentle reader, want to read what I've written,  here are some of my  lucubrations.
    I plan to write book reviews and talk about things that have affected me.  I'll also write on some philosophical and theological issues.   There will be some fun posts, too. I'm not always a serious guy.  I'll be glad to read your comments.   It will be a pleasure to learn from all of you.