I was in England for the first time when I was fifteen. Besides two day-trips into the United States when I was in elementary school, it was my first experience in a foreign country. I spent five days in England, four days in France and four days in Switzerland. It was in connection with an essay contest that I had won, and I travelled with one other person from every province and territory in Canada and one from every state in the U.S. It was easily the most formative single experience of my life. In the wake of the Charlottetown Accord, the campaign for the second Québec sovereignty referendum, the Turbot War (Spanish Fishing Crisis) and the North American Free-Trade Agreement, I, like many Canadians, was brimming with thoughts of nation and patrimony. Combine this with a fifteen-year-old masculine sense of honour and duty and pride, and I think my patriotism could have burst, blasting maple syrup all over any unsuspecting stander-by. Though I didn't know it at the time, I went to Europe in search of Canada. I caught glimpses of it in my conversations with Americans and Britons, with French and Swiss, with Québécois and Newfoundlanders. I saw the differences, and came back understanding those routines I had mistaken for silences as something that a concept like "Canada" unexpectedly represented. I came to see, I think, that if there is to be a nation at all, and if it is to be real and good and intelligent and at peace in the world, then the very things that define it would be at all times invisible to its citizens.
In a similar way, I came to know myself by negative relief. A small town can be something of a fishbowl and, for all that one might love it and honour what it is, one can and I think ought to wonder how one might change simply by virtue of not being watched. Europe was also my first experience in the presence of many and the absence of any that I knew. And, unfettered by perceived expectations, I discovered something very much like Vance. Nothing surprising. Just, likely a more comfortable version of Vance, Vance happier with himself and at peace with his choices.
The experience, then, of making the inverse trip, of living first in Zambia, and then Spain, and then England, is remarkably different. Having seen something akin to extremes of difference from Canada, being in the U.K. makes me conscious of our similarities. English Canadians got a lot from the British. It is hard to articulate what, because it is not immediately obvious in language or culinary preferences or social habits. It is more in subtle things, like the shapes of the knobs on guardrails, the tacit desire to label things, the belief that clothes cover the body rather than expressing the soul. These phenomena are not universal. Then, the use of flags as decoration, seen throughout the United States, pales in comparison to what is done in Britain. And oddly, certain aspects of Zambia that seemed very foreign—the love of cakes, the clustering of like businesses, the predeliction to expressing enthusiasm or endorsement with "OK!"—turn out to be British, as well, like Britain was a plum pudding that was picked apart over centuries, raisins going to one colony, peel to another, dough to another.
Meantime, Kirsten and I are finishing up a Canadian history course. I am writing about the Charlottetown Accord and the Turbot war and the Québec referendum and NAFTA for students who were not alive when these things happened. Except now I have lived in Québec and I have lived in Spain and I have crossed truly open borders and I have politicked with the people who first tried to revamp Canada's Constitution. All those things that got my patriotic adolescent heart pounding almost two decades ago, they're now integrated somewhere in something like Vance.
I've accidentally come into accord with John Ralston Saul, that Canada is an idea, or it is nothing at all. And not only is it such a good idea, but finally, after looking for it for so long, I'm finally acquiring the language to describe what that idea is.
In a similar way, I came to know myself by negative relief. A small town can be something of a fishbowl and, for all that one might love it and honour what it is, one can and I think ought to wonder how one might change simply by virtue of not being watched. Europe was also my first experience in the presence of many and the absence of any that I knew. And, unfettered by perceived expectations, I discovered something very much like Vance. Nothing surprising. Just, likely a more comfortable version of Vance, Vance happier with himself and at peace with his choices.
The experience, then, of making the inverse trip, of living first in Zambia, and then Spain, and then England, is remarkably different. Having seen something akin to extremes of difference from Canada, being in the U.K. makes me conscious of our similarities. English Canadians got a lot from the British. It is hard to articulate what, because it is not immediately obvious in language or culinary preferences or social habits. It is more in subtle things, like the shapes of the knobs on guardrails, the tacit desire to label things, the belief that clothes cover the body rather than expressing the soul. These phenomena are not universal. Then, the use of flags as decoration, seen throughout the United States, pales in comparison to what is done in Britain. And oddly, certain aspects of Zambia that seemed very foreign—the love of cakes, the clustering of like businesses, the predeliction to expressing enthusiasm or endorsement with "OK!"—turn out to be British, as well, like Britain was a plum pudding that was picked apart over centuries, raisins going to one colony, peel to another, dough to another.
Meantime, Kirsten and I are finishing up a Canadian history course. I am writing about the Charlottetown Accord and the Turbot war and the Québec referendum and NAFTA for students who were not alive when these things happened. Except now I have lived in Québec and I have lived in Spain and I have crossed truly open borders and I have politicked with the people who first tried to revamp Canada's Constitution. All those things that got my patriotic adolescent heart pounding almost two decades ago, they're now integrated somewhere in something like Vance.
I've accidentally come into accord with John Ralston Saul, that Canada is an idea, or it is nothing at all. And not only is it such a good idea, but finally, after looking for it for so long, I'm finally acquiring the language to describe what that idea is.
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