Noblesse

It's 7:30 PM and I'm sitting up in my hotel room bed, in for the night. My sons and I will go swimming at 9:30 or so, but my feet are finished walking, and there's no chance that I'll leave this hotel tonight.

We walked to St. Joseph's Oratory today, 4 or so uphill miles from our hotel; and then returned to McGill University, and decided to walk to the top of Mont Royal, too. I recorded 26,000 steps today. That's not the real story, though (but 26,000! Impressive!). The real story is how amazingly beautiful the Oratory and Mont Royal Park are, and how much work and prayer went into the creation of both of these miraculous places.

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Most people know Frederick Law Olmsted as the designer of New York's Central Park, but apparently, he was also involved in the design of Mont Royal Park. According to Wikipedia, an economic crash in the mid 19th century prompted Montreal's city planners to abandon many of Olmsted's very ambitious plans for the park. This is astonishing to me, because it's still amazingly beautiful and welcoming, the type of public space that the great 19th century robber barons built with their vast fortunes. Using winding paths and wooden stairs built into the side of the mountain, visitors can either climb or hike to the top, where Chateau Mont Royal will welcome them with ice cream and cold drinks and overpriced souvenirs. (Buy an expensive t-shirt! It's not cheap to maintain a thing like Mont Royal!) Then, they can stand on the overlook, with all of magnificent Montreal spreading below, and enjoy the feeling of accomplishment that comes with having climbed a mountain--even a relatively small one.

I tried, unsuccessfully, to take a panoramic picture.
Trust me, it's much more impressive in person. 

St. Joseph's is even more magnificent. You walk and walk and walk down Chemin de la Cote des Neiges, growing more and more certain that you have the wrong directions and that your GPS doesn't know what the hell it's talking about. And then, just as you approach Chemin Queen Mary, you see the very top of the dome emerging from the tree canopy.

OMG! There it is!

St. Joseph's was also built during the midst of an economic crisis. According to the $2 Visitor's Guide, construction was halted in 1931. Brother Andre was supposed to have ordered the construction company to place a statue of St. Joseph in the open structure. "If he wants a roof over his head, he'll make sure that the money is there." A few years later, construction was complete.

This is what it looks like today, as you approach on foot.

Mont Royal Park was built with the help of municipal funds and private donations from Canada's robber baron counterparts (descendants of Hudson Bay traders, I guess). And St. Joseph's was completed with the help of private funding from donors large and small (but probably mostly large). 

I don't like to indulge in class-warfare rhetoric. If you compare my life to the lives of most people who have ever lived for all of human history, then I'm the one percent, and I could do a lot better at noblesse oblige. On the other hand, it's hard to compare today's super rich (no Donald Trump, not including you, because no one expects anything from you) to the super rich of the 19th and early 20th centuries and not feel a little bit shortchanged. The Carnegies and the Mellons and the Vanderbilts endowed parks and hospitals and museums that were built to last forever. I guess it's still too early to say what the Buffets and the Gates and the Zuckerbergs will leave behind. If it's anything half as magnificent as Mont Royal Park and St. Joseph's Oratory, then I guess I can forgive them for Facebook and Windows Vista. 

9:00 now. I'm too tired to move, but swimming doesn't count as moving. More Montreal tomorrow, maybe. A bientot. 

En Francais, s'il vous plait

I had planned, before we came to Montreal, to study and try to improve my French a little bit. I use Duolingo for Spanish, and I thought that I'd just add an additional language and practice for a few minutes a day. And then all of a sudden it was the day before our trip, and I hadn't practiced at all. Zut, alors.

I took two years of French in high school, switching to Spanish during my junior year. I also took an additional semester of French in college. After that, I hardly ever spoke or read anything in French, so I was well out of practice. I also took only two years of Spanish, but everyone who lives in Silver Spring, Maryland can speak a little bit of Spanish; and between hearing Spanish spoken every day and practicing with Duolingo, I can get by in Spanish; or at least, I can follow a conversation.

But when in Montreal, I like to do as the Montrealers do, and I've been trying to speak French as much as possible, with limited success. I get a little better each day, though.

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I don't have much of a talent for languages, other than my own. It's humbling to realize that even as I gain a little bit of competency in basic French conversation (lentement, s'il vous plait!) I will never, and I mean NEVER, achieve real fluency.

I'm an editor, so when I read signs or posters, especially long signs (pool rules, for example), I edit and rewrite them in my mind. The English-language rules posted at the hotel pool, for example, are badly written. This might be because a French speaker wrote them; but I've been to enough pools in the United States to know that it's just as likely that they were written by a native English speaker--pool rules signs are always badly written for some reason. After I finished my edit, the sign was stripped of unnecessary capital letters (another Grammar/Punctuation Derangement Syndrome trigger) and altogether much better and more clearly written, in my mind. But the French sign? Who knows? Even as I congratulated myself for being able to understand 70 percent of the sign without referring to the English version, I realized that I had NO IDEA if it was grammatically correct. That sign could be a morass of bad grammar and poor word choices; and riddled with spelling and typographical errors, and I'd be clueless. Humbling.

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So this morning, we visited the Musée d'Art Contemporain de Montréal. My favorite exhibit was "Les Prophetes," a collection of tiny creations made of string and bits of wood and plastic and colored paper, all marked with handwritten labels. Each of the pieces is a three-dimensional representation of an economic statistic of some sort. I picked up an exhibit guide, but haven't read enough yet to know whether or not the statistics are real or made up for the sake of the project.

It looks so cheerful, n'est-ce pas? Actual
caption: "Work Fatalities in Europe by Country." 

I loved this for two reasons. The world (meaning the part of the world in which I live and work) is preoccupied with "metrics," to an unhealthy extent, and I like the idea that each of these metrics can be reduced to nothing more than colors and shapes, no more meaningful than the string and colored paper they're made of. I also loved the finicky care with which each of the pieces is assembled and labeled. I pictured myself at age 11 or so spending weeks constructing and labeling something similar.

"The Unit Simplex." Reminiscent of a Spirograph drawing.

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In the afternoon, we went to the Montreal Botanic Garden, taking our first ride on the Montreal Metro, which is very much like the Washington, DC Metro. Pie IX station deposits you right at Montreal's Olympic Stadium, which is certainly the ugliest place in Montreal, and maybe one of the ugliest in North America. On a hot day, there's nothing less inviting than a nearly all-concrete stadium, as they were built in the early 1970s. To call the Olympic stadium reminiscent of East Germany strikes me as unfair to East Germany, which after all, I have never visited. Maybe it was pretty and cheerful in 1976. In 2018, it's a parched, sun-baked concrete bowl, marked by graffiti, its cracked walkways overgrown with weeds and unshaded by even a single tree. We didn't inquire about the tour.

The Botanic Garden, however, is beautiful and exactly the remedy for the soul-crushing malaise of the Olympic stadium. I took lots of pictures there. Here is one.

It's a flower. I have no idea what kind. 

It's 9 PM now, and time to swim. Mont Royal and St. Joseph's Oratory tomorrow. Au revoir a demain.

Ma'am like Ham

For over a week, I tried to finish reading a book that I didn't like very much. I always feel compelled to finish a book that I start, even when I don't like it; and it takes me forever to read a book that I don't like. I thought about giving up on it, but then I decided to just alternate between it and a different book--there are so many in my Kindle backlog that I want to read.

The book in question is Alison Lurie's Imaginary Friends. It takes place in upstate New York in (I think) the late 1970s or early 1980s, as a pair of social science professors attempt to infiltrate a very small religious sect that believes (sincerely, I think, though I'm only about halfway through) that a higher order of beings from a planet named Varna have achieved true enlightenment, and that a small group of chosen people on Earth can achieve similar enlightenment if they adhere to a series of ever-weirder made-up teachings. A review that I read characterized the novel as a satire of academia, particularly social science, and I guess that's true enough. It's better as a commentary on people who are willing to believe a lie, no matter how obvious. Particularly relevant now, of course, but I can't seem to stay engaged in the story.

It's Sunday now; a rainy Sunday after a very rainy Saturday. So instead of swimming, I'm at home, watching "The Queen," which was free on demand. I love this movie. This is the third or so time that I've seen it. I love the part at the beginning, when the Queen is sitting for her portrait, and chatting with the artist about how fortunate he is to be allowed to vote. She envies him "the joy of being partial." That's the attraction of politics, I suppose. It's the tribal instinct, the joy of being partial, of picking a side.

I love Queen Elizabeth, too. On her twenty-first birthday in 1947, she gave the speech that included the famous passage "I declare before you all that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service." She meant it, and she has kept her promise throughout her whole, long life. I'm a small-r republican by conviction, but a royalist at heart. 

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Later, the sun came out for just about an hour. I ran to the pool, and swam laps for 45 minutes, stopping only when a thunderclap prompted a long whistle from the lifeguard's chair. The water, after two days of rain, was no longer warm, but not quite cold--a perfect contrast with the still-warm, humid air. I fell asleep later, feeling as if I was still moving through cool water.  

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And now it's Tuesday, 10:15 PM, and I just finished work. I worked until 10 PM last night, too; and also worked for a few hours on Saturday. So I'm tired. Tired and out of sorts. It's been raining for two days, and I haven't been swimming, and my eyes are tired, and my head is aching; and so obviously, what would I do except sit in front of the computer and write even more? 

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I finally gave up (temporarily) on Imaginary Friends, but ironically, I'm sort of itching to know how it turns out. So I'll revisit it again, a chapter at a time, until I finally finish. I'm reading a memoir now, Lynn Freed's Leaving Home: Reading, Writing, and Life on the Page. It's quite good, two-part, colon-separated title aside. Tiresome. The title, that is. 

And I'm leaving home next week; on vacation, I mean. We're going to Montreal, a place I've never visited, but for some reason, seemed the only reasonable place to go. I reserved our hotel rooms early in the month, and then called last night to confirm. I can stumble along in something that resembles French, but I can't conduct business in any language except English, so when the desk agent answered the phone in English, I immediately said "Bonsoir--parlez-vous Anglais?" And she said, as I expected she would, "Mais oui! Bien sur!" Maybe a week in Montreal will improve my French. I'm sure that it will improve my attitude. Au revoir, until next week.