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Letter Two (excerpt)
- Wilfrid Laurier University Press
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Letter Two (excerpt) In times gone by, I preferred a still earlier period. The older people seemed more alive to me, and I would try to visualise them as the wild-fox spirits they had been. They would recall when cities were the normal means of being. The stories they could tell of Winnipeg in its glory! Going there now is like visiting a ruin no one reveres. In those days, people came and went on streetcars up and down Portage Avenue. If you see such a streetcar today, run, or stand perfectly still; it may not be stopping for you this time. I would go to thrift shops searching for the rejected books, the most obsolete clothes, thoroughly discarded decorative objects. I made a little museum on the walls of my bedroom. There were old newspapers, photographs on stiff card of unidentified persons thrown out when other persons died, Second World War ration tokens, advertisements which had lost all their context, leaving only their design, which I cherished. Now when I sink back into the past, it is to this world, not the intervening one I’ve seen grow old around me (and me with it). History was a mistake. I mistook it for something that was still there. At the present rate the world gives birth to a new Mexico City each year (with Mexico itself swelling all the time). Half the world’s people live in cities but hate one another. Epidemics do their best to round off the total to the nearest billion. Can history have any meaning in a moment this vast? That’s the question no one asks directly. It doesn’t come up in interviews or dinner party conversation. We all fear that yesterday has no precedent worth applying. There I’ve said it and I’m glad. 34 / Plans Deranged by Time ...