Footnotes to a Conversation, January 13, 2025
“There is no such thing as the pursuit of happiness, but there is the discovery of joy.” – Joyce Grenfell
Raising Hare
In Raising Hare, Chloe Dalton raises a young hare to adulthood. It sleeps in the house by day and runs free at night. She says, “For the first time in my life, I have had cause to study animals rather than people, and to see that we are not diminished by making way for them. Coexistence gives our own existence greater poignancy, and perhaps even grandeur. My wish now is for an environment that is safer for hares and other creatures of the land, wherever they may live: not at the expense of humans, but in balance with our priorities. I wish there were more wild, undisturbed places, for both wildlife and for us as humans, and a greater understanding that restoring and appreciating nature meets needs we sometimes forget we have. Under the subtle influence of the hare, my own wants have simplified. To be dependable in love and friendship more than in work. To leave the land in a more natural state than I found it. And to take better care of what is to hand, seeing beauty and value in the ordinary.” I highly recommend reading this book.
One World
We tend to downplay the influence of Islamic culture on western culture. Islamesque by Diana Darke demonstrates the Middle Eastern influence on Europe’s great buildings. Through war and trade, Christian Europe was able to draw “on the superior knowledge and skills of the Islamic world and its craftworkers to create its own monuments.” Big Ben in London resembles the 11th-century minaret of the Great Mosque of Aleppo, while in Peterborough Cathedral “carpenters created an intricately jointed and decorated wooden ceiling using techniques then unknown in Europe”. [The Guardian]
Make a List
I keep a list of the books I read on Librarything (106 in 2024 but only 13 were in French – sigh!). I don’t make great use of the list apart from ensuring I don’t read the same book twice, and I am trying to increase the number of books I read in French. For some people, setting a reading goal is a source of stress or a desire for moral improvement. In I List Therefore I Am: Letting Go of Reading List Anxiety, Tajja Isen says, “tracking one’s reading is not the cause but a symptom of a culture insistent on assigning extrinsic value to books. This transcends the cycle of the annual resolution. Prevalent in the discourse around literature is the idea that we should read because doing so would let us siphon out some functional value. That reading more books will make us more empathetic. Smarter. More tolerant.” Isen, on the other hand, uses her list “to get a keener sense of my own tastes as a reader and how to both indulge and challenge them more satisfyingly and more often. It’s a way of pushing back against the prescriptions of various algorithms and cultural drifts to instead refine my own sonar for what brings me pleasure. Often, I use these lists to formulate a series of open-ended prompts for the fresh calendar. Goals like: more books published earlier than this year. Or: Anna Karenina, finally. Or the most important one of all: more books you actually want to read.” [The Walrus]
Exploring the Options: Wine in BC
In a tough year when freezing temperatures killed grapevines across the Okanagan, BC winemakers are exploring new varieties and new combinations of grapes such as a blend of Gewürtztraminer and Cabernet Sauvignon. The blend turned out remarkably well, lending “credence to taking chances, being nimble with choices and opportunities, and trusting a process … last year has found us at a crossroads. It’s been a time when local wine growers have had to deal with the unexpected, get creative and rethink the future. I find the Scout Vineyard 2022 Gew Cab to be an inspiring example of the innovation that can spring from necessity: it’s something unexpected, and the result of taking a chance and rethinking one’s potential.” [The Tyee]
Footnotes to a Conversation is a weekly Monday feature covering an assortment of topics that I’ve come across in the preceding week – books, art, travel, food, and whatever else strikes my fancy. I also post occasional articles on other dates, including frequent book reviews and travel tales.
If you share my love of nature, check out EcoFriendly West, an online publication encouraging environmental initiatives in Western Canada, and Nature Companion, a free nature app for Canada’s four western provinces.