Who freed Scotland from the English oak?

Currently at UW: 12.2. The temperature has, apparently, marched up five degrees in the last two hours. There was a bit of snow yesterday morning, after eleven straight days of rain, the first ten of which were in the UK. A lot places, people like to say, if you don't like the weather, wait five minutes. In the UK, judging by my ten days there, it's true. But, you know, as keeping these weather records has drawn my attention to, the weather in a place can get caught up in a pattern for a couple of weeks that it might not repeat again for years. Still, the cloud patterns everywhere we were in the UK--fast-moving multiple layers, rain from not much cloud--were the sort of thing you'd see only on the most unsettled summer days in southern Ontario.

I went away for ten days, less than 48 hours of which were in Whitby, and all of those hours in Whitby were before Whitby Proper, but I feel like I went away to Whitby--even though the end was a frightening night on a park bench (in a hotel room) in Manchester. Whitby, the place, is a marvellous place. As for Whitby the thing, I wonder whether the difference between it and C8 is in the thing itself or in me. A little from column A; a little from column B. Or a lot, either or....

It was unsettling to come back here from the UK. Part of it's this: virtually every place in Canada that doesn't have an aboriginal name is named after some place in Britain. All those places in Britain are named after some thing in the neighbourhood. Their names mean something. In Canada, they don't. Some while ago I realized that every bit of old architecture in Toronto is an imitation. Toronto, like England, had its gothic revival--but Toronto, unlike England, had nothing to revive. I realized that some while ago and still, when I went to England, it was disorienting to see characteristically gothic things that were much, much older than Victorian.

It is too easy in North America to think that we've invented the world and the world always was and will be as it is here now. Though what North America has and the UK doesn't is the primitive. The UK seems to get along between the not-quite-fully-modern and the not-quite-entirely-ancient (I mean, you have to ask yourself what accounts for the persistence of the separate hot and cold bathroom taps); North America is absolutely split between the modern and the primitive.

Which is one of the themes of The Crossing, which is the only thing I read on my travels. (Being and Nothingness surely by now holds my record for ratio of carried-around to read.) Billy's unfitness to serve in WWII symbolizes that. I was actually in suspense, for a while, wondering if he'd actually go, and how on Earth that could be made to fit. But it doesn't fit; he's unfit.

What's interesting about that contrast, when I thought about it a little, though, is that it's not the 19th versus the 20th centuries. It's much older than that. An ancient Greek army might not have had the technology to detect Billy's unfitness, but he still would have been unfit for it. He doesn't have the heart for it. In other words: every urban culture is a modern culture (which is the contradiction that Heidegger saw in Nazism).

I was, shall I say, amused to find a lot of saintalbatross in this book. A Mormon-gnostic, even! But a Mormon-gnostic-"me"--and he doesn't say what the "me" is.

There is an unusual amount of speechifying in this book, and this, I guess, is what accounts for the blurb from the Village Voice inside the cover, which says that this book is "deeper" than McCarthy's previous books, going beyond their mere "description", and casting them in a new light, providing them with a new interpretation. Well, what can you say about that. It's not like you don't find desperate stupidity everywhere, whether it's stabbing your horse in the chest for no fathomable reason on the road in Mexico or whatever. The thing about this book, though, is you can't trust anything anyone says, even though you want to--you want to pick out something, some one bit of wisdom pronounced to Billy, as the Very Truth Itself. The one thing I want to pick out is the bit pronounced by the crooked but benevolent businessman, who says that the past is not there to be set right and that every action has a future beyond its control--which seems to have been born out by the entire book up until the bandits stab the horse and throw Boyd's bones to the ground. But Billy does gather them up again and, apparently, bury them in New Mexico. It's all true, but none of it's the very truth itself.

None of the speeches, that is. There's a lot, in this book, about storytelling, and the relationship between stories and the world. There's a lot that says the world is nothing and the stories told about it are everything. (There's a map drawn in the sand which is dismissed as a fantasy, and then an unresolved argument about whether it's better to have a fantastic map or no map at all.) But Billy knows that the wolf didn't come down from the mountains of Mexico and his brother wasn't shot in the act of slaying the villain, despite the stories. He knows what the world is; it is what it is. (I was taken aback to come across that line, "it is what it is", in this book--it's one of my pet peeves of the last couple of years, as it has spread from sports to politics.) The question, which remains a question, is whether what it is matters. The problem seems to be this: to matter, what is needs a witness to render it into a story, but every story told by human beings is wrong--so God needs to be the witness-storyteller--but God, evidently, is either absent or a trickster too. Billy knows, but he doesn't have a story to tell, and in the end he has nothing at all.