The Land of the Ugly Duckling
We landed on North American soil. No doubt about that, as the Atlantic is a tremendous barrier that severs culture from culture — American from European. We landed within Canadian borders. But we landed in Montreal, in Quebec. Were we now Canadians in one of the ten Canadian provinces? Or were we "Québécois" within the political expediency that is Canada?
As the saying goes: "if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it must be a duck". The contrary must also true, as the Ugly Duckling so aptly discovered: "if it does not look, walk or talk like a duck, it mustn't be a duck". The "Québécois" are by political standards simply Canadians. And yet, they just do not fit in with Canadian appearance, walk and talk.
As we were now to be citizens with political and social responsibilities and parents with educational ones, we had to face up to the Quebec fact.
With all the competence of a professor of political philosophy and a Ph.D. in Law and a Ph.D. in Philosophy, but mainly with all the liberty of an outsider, Carlos once remarked that Canada is an absurdity: Quebec within Canada, that is. An absurdity grown out of history. An absurdity for the logical mind. Otherwise, at best, an expediency.
By all counts, except one, Canada should be a strictly English country as are Australia, the United States and England. Quebec is the one count that contradicts all the others. It contains one fourth of the population of Canada. It geographically cuts that country in two: central Ontario and the western provinces on one hand and the eastern-seaboard provinces on the other. What matters is that over eighty percent of the Quebec population is French-speaking within an otherwise English-speaking nation. The sheer mass of French-speaking Canadians in that province makes them impossible for them to be assimilated to the country's majority in any near future. And the divisive nature of democratic politics necessarily gives the "Québécois" a balance of power that prevents Canada from being united in uniformity. Should a majority of Canadians wish there were no such thing as hyphenated Canadians, the French-Canadian factor, meaning the Québec factor, prevents this wish from becoming a reality. On the other hand, the small percentage of French-Canadians within the whole of Canada prevents them from having the impact that would make this land their home from coast to coast.
"Canadiens", yet not "Canadians", the Frenchies — better known as Frogs, God knows why — certainly do not talk like the run of the mill Duck. And whoever crept out of his backyard at least once knows how difficult and embarrassing a language barrier can be. The more so when it becomes a matter of everyday living.
This problem is acutely felt by those few French-Canadians living dispersed outside Quebec in the nine other provinces. If Quebec can be seen as an island of French in the North American sea of English, the French-Canadians in the rest of Canada are more like passengers in isolated life-boats. The survival of their language as a practical reality is a daily and losing battle, notwithstanding its heroics and some partial successes. Though their legal status is somewhat better than that of many linguistic minorities in the world, their social relevance is far too insignificant to be of consequence. Of course, this would not disturb Canada were it not for the Quebec factor.
In Quebec, the English-speaking minority is generally better off than the French-speaking minority in the rest of Canada. This stems from the dominant position the English language has on the continent, but also from the fact that it has firmer social institutions inherited from those who had been conquerors of the land two centuries before. Yet, through the growth of democratic industrialism, the French-speaking majority has now invaded and dominated the cities, thus social life, and infiltrated all of society through its political dominance of the provincial and major municipal governments, at a time when the government is present everywhere. The English-speaking minority senses a growing pressure to join with the majority or be odd man out. And some English-Canadians are leaving Quebec while others are learning French.
These facts show that the linguistic barrier divides far more than it unites. There is an ugly duckling among the ducks.
Yet there is more to the "two solitudes" than language. The vast majority of the six million French in Canada, five million of which are in Quebec, are the descendants of some sixty thousand French settlers who stayed behind on Canadian soil when their social elite returned to France after the defeat incurred by that country two centuries ago. Thus, the "Québécois" are one big family, closely knit, in which strangers are rapidly singled out and to which adaptation is difficult. This contrasts greatly with the general melting-pot (or "multicultural") phenomenon by which Canada (English-speaking Canada) has grown. There, politics can be enacted out somewhat impersonally; in Quebec, by contrat, one continually has the feeling that the "Québécois" are a big family role-playing politics (with due seriousness).
Of course, this also comes from the diverging temperaments of the two peoples. Caricatures exaggerate facts, yet resemble them. So a man once put it this way: "On the weekend, an English-Canadian will get drunk behind closed doors. Come Monday morning, he will shower, dress neatly and be back on the job as if nothing happened. A "Québécois" will get drunk at a public bar. Come Monday morning, he'll be on the job ill-dressed, with a tired look, and brag he drank ten times more than he did."
Consider also that the English speak in undertones and understatements, while the "Québécois" bellows his overstatements to make his points. Consequently, the one will multiply the face value of the overstatements of the other, while the other will divide the face value of understatements of the first. And what if these two must live together in political and social understanding? Quebec's French newsmedia will regularly expose scandals one should minimise and the Canadian media will allude to scandals one could maximise. Reading each other, the "Québécois" will feel that les Anglais are mild square heads; whilst the Canadian (English) will feel the Frogs are howling maniacs.
This will find much confirmation in the social image each society projects. Quebec is necessarily a lop-sided society because of its history. When France let go of New France — those "few acres of snow" as Voltaire called it — the settlers lost their main source of capital and access to the world market. Free trade evidently favoured the English businessmen in Quebec and Canada. The French-Canadians turned to the land as their proper means of subsistence. They became essentially an agrarian people. In the twentieth century, Quebec finally grew into an industrial and democratic society like so many other lands. Lacking industrialists and businessmen, the French-speaking Quebeckers rapidly became a majority in the working class just as they already were in the provincial government. Their unions became more vocal and their government became the general instrument to get a better deal in life. Business and the private sector were English (or American) — the unions chose to fight and the government had to deal with them just as they did with strangers. Inevitably, social speeches in Quebec differ in tone and aspect from those in the rest of Canada, where the business community is as indigenous as all the others.
Of course, the "Québécois" should not be expected to act like the (English) Canadians. Their cooking is generally more refined, and their driving more anarchic, as bewildered tourists are quick to discover. A pedestrian respects a red light only when the traffic is too dense for him to cross the street and a motorist respects the speed limit only when he has reason to believe there are police in the area monitoring. As for working relationships, they are more militant than elsewhere in Canada. On the other hand, I was told that Quebec women are more beautiful. That may be, but I married a Swiss who is the most beautiful woman I have ever laid eyes on.
In a way, one could get the feeling that the difference between the "Québécois" and Canadians is similar to that between the French and the English in the old countries. After all, were not the French sufficiently anarchic to cut off a king's head in order to democratically industrialize, whereas the English blush in shame at the thought that a scoundrel like Cromwell should have done the same on flimsy political grounds. As for the driving habits of the Parisian, they are proverbial. We can't compete.
Yet, the "Québécois" are not simply imported French. Though flamboyant and undisciplined, they are a gentle people. One day, I was with a few hundred of these people, all packed like sardines in the hall of a cinema, eagerly waiting to see the second part of the Star Wars saga (in French). There was an unexplained delay of some forty-five minutes. All these frustrated people, crushed together like sardines simply complained to each other in hushed voices. In Paris, there would have been a riot.
Also, for a few years, a terrorist-type organisation exploded some bombs here and there under the guise of Quebec nationalism. Nationalism being on the upsurge, this organisation was generally considered with respect and sympathy by many "Québécois". But the day these terrorists murdered in cold blood a cabinet minister of the Quebec government, they instantly lost all popular support. They would not become liberators of the people. The "Québécois" are not that kind of a people. Furthermore when, some years later, the "Parti Québécois", the democratic expression of Quebec nationalism, would try to win popular support for the political independence of Quebec, its bid would be for "Sovereignty-Association" — a paradox cynics translated into "an independent Quebec within a strong Canada". Independence was too strong a word.
That is what we met when we arrived in Quebec. We had returned to Quebec and not to Manitoba (not to "Canada") through a sense of loyalty towards Danielle's parents who had been tied down on this side of the Atlantic by our marriage. But, as parents, we now felt this option to be in line with our wish for our children to grow up in our language and culture. As parents, we now saw more clearly that in Manitoba, our children would simply have been eased into the dominant language and culture as its presence is everywhere be it on the street, on television, school and in the workplace. They would have become strangers for their parents, especially for Danielle, who had learnt English late in her teens. We would now be "Québécois" within the Canadian "absurdity", to use Carlos' words.
* * *
Needless to say, we were greeted joyously by Danielle's parents. Then all of us thanked Marie-Jeanne profusely for her generosity beyond the call of duty, and she was off on another plane towards Winnipeg, Manitoba, then to her home in the country.
All the family drove off in Mr Quéloz' car for a two hundred and forty mile trip to our new home in La Pocati re. Make it three hundred and eighty six kilometres.
We were back in empty spaces doted with the occasional village or city. Beloeil mountain, a short way off Montréal appeared to us to be only a small hill. The colour of the land was yellowish green instead of the Swiss sparkling green. Everywhere the land seemed untidy in comparison to the intensive caretaking of the Swiss. Yet we also got the impression that the sheer vastness of the country would make it impossible for anyone to tame it any further. More important, we were back in a land where toasts could be had for breakfast instead of croissants or bread, butter and jam. We were back in a country with peanut butter on the shelves. Surprisingly, I had seen peanut butter in Lausanne, near Fribourg (everywhere is near in Switzerland), about a month before leaving. I chose not to desecrate our palates. Two years without peanut butter should be respected and we waited to be back home to feast on it.
The trip home was long, but the car was swift as we drove on the smooth divided Trans-Canada Highway, Number 20: till we got to Montmagny, some forty-five miles from La Pocati re. That was where highway Number 20 came to an end. Next was an ordinary two lane undivided highway full of tourists in hot July. We slowly inched ahead, joking some of us could walk on ahead to La Pocati re. An eternity having gone by, Mrs Quéloz showed us the three hills approaching La Pocati re. We would soon be home. Yet, as the landscape was new for us, the hills hardly became distinctive. It would take some getting used to for them and their surroundings to become meaningful for us. We entered the city of La Pocati re. Our hosts showed us the Skidoo Enterprises (later to become part of the Bombardier, international train and subway car builders), the backbone of the local industry. We paid more attention when shown, on own left, a venerable and impressive building: the junior college where I would be teaching. It was of the same vintage as St. Boniface College back in Manitoba. Both were venerable by our standards: never by those of Europe. Straight ahead there was the new church. Of recent build, of the sixties vintage, when churches were meant to look like something quite different from what people before thought churches should look like. And it was different. Certainly not thirteenth century, nor anything of the twentieth before the sixties. La Pocatière is the city in which resided the bishop of the Diocese of Ste-Anne-de-la-Pocatière. Therefore, the main church is a cathedral.
We turned right, drove a few streets south and turned left on the unpaved 12th Avenue. It was empty all the way, except for some triplets far in the middle: three identical buildings each made of two flat-topped semi-detached houses. Clustered together in the void, they seemed like toy-houses, though they were two-stories high. But that impression did not last. The car parked by the last of the six houses was that of Danielle's parents who at the front door to welcome us as we crossed the threshold into our first house.
In Switzerland, Michel, then Johanne had turned an otherwise spacious apartment into cramped quarters. The inside of our house, our home, was simply gigantic. The living room might be comparable to the one we had just left, but it was followed by an unbelievably long kitchen with a window over the sink, a true to life refrigerator, a table for us all and more; but most remarkable and most appreciated were the clothes washer and dryer right there for everyday use, automatic, with wash cycles lasting less than an hour and a half. Danielle was overjoyed. Upstairs there was the master bedroom and two other rooms: one for Michel and one for the girls. A pair of bunk beds had been separated for Michel and Christine, and Johanne had a baby's crib. As soon as she would be old enough to sleep in a regular bed, she would bunk beneath Christine, so to keep that room spacious. This would be done by buying another pair of bunk beds, as the next baby, (whenever and whoever) would bunk beneath Michel. The house had been furnished with simple good taste. An important point — the house luckily had two toilet rooms. One upstairs, with a bath; the other at the end of the kitchen, near the side door of the house. Not only could they serve more people, they were also at the best places for service. One upstairs for night calls, and one near the backyard for the daily roster. The basement was bare, ready for anything the future would require. Outside, the newly-sown lawn had already grown, and the newly-built fence was waiting for its first paint job.
Danielle and I felt as if we had entered paradise, while her parents indulged in well-earned pride for having given us this happiness. We thanked them over and over again.
Of course, Christine and Michel were rather out-of-it after the long trip, the change of scenery, new people and their new home. They would adapt tomorrow. Johanne was too young to notice or care fabout anything other than food and sleep.
That night, we fell into a deep slumber, exhausted and happy, in our first house, our true home for the future.
* * *
Next morning, quite confident and hardly modest parents — us — were in for a surprise and another piece of humble pie. After breakfast, we let Christine and Michel out in the (fenced) back-yard, confident in Christine and apprehensive for Michel. Suddenly, Christine was sobbing by the door and Michel was running free and wild round and round the yard along the inside of the fence.
This somewhat upset our confidence in our insight. I was now closer to Michel as Danielle was mainly in charge of our baby girl. Thus, as time past, I began to discover in him an altogether different child from what we had thought. He was not simply a male Christine. He was of a different temperament altogether, one alien to Danielle's spontaneity and understanding. Michel had his father's temper. He was introvert, slow to react, fearful of unpredictability, needing to be confined in his secure four walls. Any brusque expectation made him pull back inside himself. Were there a rush, he would slow down. Should we have to help him dress in a hurry, he would become limp. Were he scolded, he would break into a smile which, for the unsuspecting, seemed to be outright defiance. One got the urge to smack that smile off his face. And we regularly had to resist that urge.
I was able to translate Michel's feelings to his mother and to myself. His inordinate actions were not the product of any ill-will but of ill-feelings. Whenever he was hurried, Michel momentarily panicked and lost control of himself. He needed time to adjust. His thoughts began whirling in his mind and his limbs slowed because of this distraction. Of course, this tended to make his parents impatient and with impatience came more efforts to hurry him on, which simply slowed his process even more. As tempers rose, his seemingly arrogant smile would appear, which was an utterly unconscious reaction equivalent to raising an arm before a menace.
As this temper was unnatural for Danielle, she had to be broken into it in order to be just and kind towards Michel. In a way, they tended to go through the cat and dog misunderstanding. When the dog wags his tail in play, the cat understands this to be an act of hostility, for he himself wags his own tail only when he is angry. The same goes for when the cat is content: he does not wag his tail, which is the dogs way showing discontent. Cats and dogs can get to live in peace, but it takes breaking in.
Our new insight allowed us to understand when Michel had been so upset in Switzerland. Aside from his digestive troubles, he was in need of an unperturbed routine and each time he cried we had tried new things on him, perturbing him ever more. We recalled that Michel had been licked, so to speak, only once. Fed up with his wails, Christine had shut the door of the room he was in so he should cry behind closed doors. And Michel had suddenly stopped crying. Danielle had been impressed but refused to go to such an extreme, feeling it would be expressing rejection of her son. In fact, when Christine shut that door, she freed Michel from the pressures of the outside world, from the unexpectability of people. He felt safe within his four walls. He could grope his way about his inner feelings at his own leisure. The same now happened when he was freed into our back-yard. He loved fences.
Unlike Michel, Christine was extrovert, like her mother. She was spontaneous, molding her feelings and expressions to the present. The yard was strange and unknown. She felt insecure and begged for our presence. What could be simpler?
These two reminded me of the anecdote in the Gospel when a father asks his two sons to do a given task. One accepts, but does not do it. The other refuses, then goes on and does it. The first was surely a Christine type. He immediately felt it best to agree when his father asked for his help. Then he felt it hard to do the task. Both times, he acted in line with the circumstances. The second son was a Michel type. He disliked to be disturbed by a change in plans, so he refused. Then he grew into the idea of the work to be done, and went ahead to do it.
Each of these temperaments has its advantages and its disadvantages. Christine is adapted to the going times and should generally be the popular person in society. But she will have difficulty resisting the lures of the times. Michel will generally be insensitive to these lures, because he grows his own roots; but then he should also be the reserved boy in the group. Our challenge as parents would be to help each according to his proper needs: helping Michel gain confidence and adapt to people and change, and helping Christine fight facility and lures.
That was the meaning of Michel's liberated frenzy and Christine's panic that first day in our back yard.
Danielle was also to find that our hectic days of packing, selling furniture and moving had taken their toll. The amount of milk Johanne drank out of her bottle proved that mother had dried up. Johanne was weaned. But she took to the local milk with the same healthy burps as before.
* * *
La Pocatière was ideal for a pedestrian family. We had never owned a car, which was quite a financial benefit. The city of La Pocatière could be walked from South to North in a brisk half-hour; from East to West, the walk could take an hour, though the most important services were nearer than that. The hospital was a twenty minute walk East. The grocery store was five minutes North of us, and the main street with its three general stores, its bank, its credit union, its few shops and restaurants, was a further eight minutes away. At the West end of main street there was, and is, the church. Across the street, a bit to the left, there is the junior college. It would take me fifteen minutes to go to work. The elementary school was composed of two buildings some seven minutes away North-East from home. For emergencies, there were two taxi companies with two-cars each, and they had reasonable prices. These would prove invaluable when there would be a need to see the doctor across the street from hospital or at the hospital outpatients service, because of fevers, broken limbs, otitis, laryngitis, viruses of all kinds, etc. We found would quickly learn that the days of doctors making house-calls were definitely history.
Surprisingly, this four-cab town offered all the advantages of a larger city. It was a regional centre of public services in an overall rural area. There were stores for necessities and for luxuries. There were schools that could your children through from Kindergarten to Junior College. Only universitieswere out of town. There was a local cinema, where a few months-old movies were shown on an indiscriminate basis: the best and the worst alike. The bishop was there with his lopsided cathedral. The hospital, the undertaker and the cemetery were all there too. In due time, the, albeit modest local shopping centre, the single street lights and the dubious strip joint would be part of the decor. It was a "city" with the works with its own policemen, firemen, aldermen and a mayor.
With a population of some five thousand, there was no postman to deliver mail. We picked up mail at the post-office, a few blocks away. Such a small population is a mere dot in the landscape, adding the fresh-air of living in the countryside while enjoying the benefits of city life.
* * *
We soon walked to the nearest grocery store, a modest super-market, the biggest, the most modern and the newest in town. It was large enough to have employees and a butcher, yet small enough for the store owner to be working in the aisles with his staff. The butcher was competent, friendly and talkative. Danielle got on very well with him, and rapidly trained him to sell her the exact amount of meat she asked for instead of a few ounces more. Talking with him and with other members of the La Pocatière community, Danielle painfully realised what she had been able to forget the last two years: she spoke with an accent. In Switzerland, I had been the stranger, which was uneventful as I went to a university full of students from elsewhere. Danielle had been able to speak freely with the locals without provoking a startled and suspicious reaction. Now, again, people were surprised by her peculiarity as soon as she uttered a word. Yet there was a change for the better from her experience in Quebec City. People did not presume her to be French, with the hostile reaction this meant. Instead, they queried in a friendly manner whether she was Belgian. The Europeans around La Pocatière were Belgian and their reputation was good.
Shopping for groceries proved to be an unexpected challenge for Danielle. Back in Manitoba, in our freewheeling days — that is, before Christine was born — Danielle adapted meals to her whims, bought what she generally considered to be a weekly menu, but trotted back to the grocery store at will and need. In Switzerland, we had been tied down to daily trips to the store. Now we had our regular family-size refrigerator and a store that delivered our groceries to our door-step. We would soon be back on the weekly shopping trip routine. But with three young children at home grocery shopping required serious meal planning for a week at a time. this was something Danielle was not used to. During the first weeks, I would have to rush to the store for missing items. Then Danielle finally got into the habit of jotting down on a piece of paper the items that were running out. She quickly mastered planning for the week and by doing so began to feel North-American again.
Finding peanut butter was a pleasure, but finding the plastic-wrapped "fresh" pastries instead of those cooked during the night so as to be fresh on the shelf in the morning took getting used to. The most ironical find was undoubtedly that of "Swiss rolls", twin chocolate cake rolls covered with chocolate, eternally fresh, yet, in their plastic bag, they were never fresh. Why "Swiss"? In a way, and quite innocently, for a while we had our cake and ate it too. We could laugh at the Swiss because of present advantages and laugh at the Quebeckers because of lost ones.
Adapting and adjusting to our new life took the rest of the summer. We did very little socially. We would greet our neighbours. A lady neighbour, whose children were the same age as ours, occasionally came by to chat with Danielle. We invited the Dean of the College and his wife, whom I had already met in Geneva. Danielle's parents came weekly giving us a helping hand around the house. I began mowing the lawn just as I had done as a young boy living at home. I painted the fence, built library shelves for my books (the philosopher's tool-box). And I got to know my college.
* * *
The CEGEP ("Collège d'enseignement général et professionnel" is somewhat the equivalent of a junior prep-college and vocational school.) de La Pocatière is located on a rise at the North end of town overlooking the St. Lawrence River, which, at that point, is sixteen miles wide. On a clear day one can see the mountain range known as the of the Laurentian on the far North shore, and at night, the village lights. "Mountains" for the locals; quaint hills for the Swiss. The junior college rents the major part of its buildings from the Saint Anne College, a private boarding school with a "Cours classique" program unique to the Province of Quebec which ended with Bacherlor of Arts degree, or equivalent. It has gone public when it was feared that the new Quebec education structure would strike down the private colleges. CEGEPs are also particular to the Province of Quebec. Those that were privately owned are known as "colleges" while the CEGEP refers to state-owned junior colleges and vocational schools. The CEGEP had barely over a thousand students, which was alot compared to what I had known in Manitoba, where the scarcity of French-speaking students made recruiting a problem; but it was a small back-country college in comparison to most others in Québec.
Philosophy being a required course, on a one course per term and a four term basis. There were in all seven teachers of philosophy. This would prevent me from being Mr Philosophy. But I would also have to face up to a new challenge in my teaching career: pluralism. Indeed, a hostile pluralism. As I saw it, the Quebec society, part and parcel of the Western World, had gone through adolescent growing pains and, as such, had felt the need to rebel against its previous Masters of wisdom. While I had been trying to grasp the profound insights of the Eternal Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, Aristotle and Plato, most of my generation had been violently rejecting them (or reinterpreting them). I was convinced that indigestion of such amplitude could only have come about because of the richness of the food. One overeats goodstuffs. Still, indigestion there was, and my colleagues, even those nearest to my own insights spoke in different philosophical tongues and were preoccupied by philosophies very from different to mine. A majority definitely differed with me on what we considered to be fundamentals. Not only would I no longer have the aura of Mr Philosophy, but also what I considered to be the basics of Wisdom would be challenged before my students by a majority of my colleagues. The students, being creatures of their time, would find it easier to be sympathetic to their ideas rather than mine.
Of course, philosophical upheavals have the advantage of imprecision: if the specialists differ on their own subject, it can hardly be expected that the administrators will be able to pinpoint requirements by which to judge the specialists. We were expected to teach and to appear to teach seriously. The quality of the content was left to the appraisal of the Department of Philosophy, made up of specialists in agreement on one major point: that each should be allowed to teach according to his own mind. If there were to be conflicting minds, the conflict would not be smothered by authoritarian dictates.
I had expected contradiction and did not fear it as I rather enjoy controversy. I was even eager to begin teaching, hoping to renew my teaching successes and to erase some memories of my Fribourg failure.
My disillusion began when I got down to preparing my courses. I discovered I no longer possessed Eternal Wisdom. I was no longer the young warrior of the mind I had been when I first began teaching. The secure and complete synthesis of wisdom I believed to be mine in those days had been challenged and shaken by Father Paul Thomas. Even if the essentials had been salvaged, the ease with which each part of the mind fitted in with the others was no longer there. It might be worked out anew, but at a great price of stress and insecurity that comes with being on a battle-field. I would understand Michel's wails in the uncertain and changing world that surrounded him.
The worst was yet to come. As I entered the classrooms, I was forced to realise that a language alone does not a countryman make. My parents both came from Quebec ancestry. But I had been raised in the plains of Manitoba, in a sea of English-speaking Canadians, Americanized by industry and media. After all, why had I clung to Chesterton so eagerly in my late teens if not because my mind was mostly English. Many French, Latin and Greek authors had influenced my thinking. But none had seduced me to such depths as that of a room filled with student. Here I was facing a class of Frenchies who could not understand a simple quotation in English, far less a text. I revelled in paradox and understatements, and was considered with suspicion and incomprehension by many of my students. At least, that is what I felt, since I had not the slightest inkling as to what went on into their minds. There was none of that spontaneous complicity between peoples of the same background, that I had found in my own college back home in Manitoba. As I trudged along, I painfully realised that I was the ugly duckling in class, and I was not about to grow into a beautiful white swan.
That year, teaching was a far cry from a stroll through a field of daisies. It was a harassing task which, by the schoolyear's end, had me taking anti-depressant for a few weeks. Yet I managed to put together Philosophy course that satisfied me and, most importantly, satisfied my students. I pulled through.
During the first term, I gave a required course on the "Philosophy of Man" to three different groups of students and an optional course on "Evolution" to another group. Briefly, the "Philosophy of Man" allowed me to show how we were the same as other natural beings, yet different. Same as beasts in being organic, sensitive and practical; different in having techniques, art, history, science, laughter, responsibility, committed friendship and religion. It stood to reason that, as the psychologist F. J. J. Buytendijk put it: "Man is not an animal with a spattering of intellectual functions. He is an incarnate spirit, which means that each of his actions in which the body is present comprises a 'spiritual dimension'". Man lives in a world penetrated with Spirit and Mind, a world where freedom and divinity are common.
"Evolution" proved more difficult to deal with, which is understandable when so many great men are at odds on the matter. Yet in my dabbling I may have managed to distinguish between the science of measures (better known as the Sciences) and the science of natures (philosophy). In fact, Evolution becomes confusing when a measurement is presumed to take the place of an insight. The measurement of the (supposed or real) growth of the brain in no way gives insight as to the nature of thought any more than the measurement of the pressure and movement of a handshake gives its meaning. Be there Evolution or not, all the great metaphysical questions of love, life, creation, God, heaven and hell remain the same. As Chesterton said in Orthodoxy: "Evolution is either an innocent scientific description of how certain earthly things came about; or, if it is anything more than this, it is an attack upon thought itself", and, I added, against the evolutionary theory produced by this disqualified mind. That is what I tried to show, and I may have partially succeeded.
The second term was the hardest, though my colleagues had graciously allowed me to give only one subject to only three groups of students, in view of the fact that I was new. But the subject matter was Man's Visions of the World. And the "World" or Universe happens to be a difficult reality to squeeze into the mind of a person which is a puny part of it. The temptation is then to resort to a scientific description of the world by which we become a dot in space, a beep in time and a variant of energised matter. Yet if man is puny in the universe, it is not inasmuch as he is a small number among larger ones, but inasmuch as he is of time and space which is so little inf the face of Eternity and Life. The test of manhood is not the weighing machine but the weight of insight and virtue. His main challenge is not found in empty space but rather in the empty mind, nor is it in impersonal light-years but in personal trust. I tried to show this in the artist's attempt to express the infinite through finite matter; in the distinction between the measured quantities of otherwise qualitative and unmeasurable beings; in the development of techniques made to enslave objects in order to free man; in the insight of history as a Story made of a pack of necessities shot through and through with freedom and indeterminations in the same way the works of man are made up of necessities and determinations inhabited by his freedom and his whims; and in God as the unique Freedom of whom man is a true yet imaged freedom. But this was hard to buy for a number of my students reared to believe that anything not measured is debunked science. And I was not in sufficient control of my shaken mind to satisfy theirs. Thus we limped ahead in common unsatisfaction.
Some students did come to our house, as we tried to make contact with them. One had just had a bad drug experience, and had been saved with tender loving care by his girl friend. He liked us, but she didn't. Another was a gentle giant gone wild on astrology, who made his point the day he told me my astrological sign without prior knowledge of my birthday. He had simply analysed my character, he told me. Could there be some obscure realism in astrology after all? If the weather can get us down, might not the physical forces of the universe influence the physical foundations of our character? Good question. But I gave it little further thought.
Then there was Bruno — we embodied the saying that contraries must meet. He was full of enthusiasm for a revolutionary world, quite the opposite of my assumption that the world of man works best if we got together to build it out of personal responsibility and generosity. He preferred the gun, I the cross. But he patiently endured me for the whole year, first in Philosophy of Man, next in Man's Visions of the World. He found pleasure in a private assignment reading and discussing all the two hundred pages I had written on the Citizen during my last year in Fribourg. He was loyal in dissent. I never convinced him. But I certainly disturbed him. As I mentioned in a previous chapter, when we parted he could no longer be a honest revolutionary, which, to my mind, was a definite success. — a success for me, but mainly for him.
And then there was Denise, a short and plump student in nursing who took my course on Philosophy of Man. She enjoyed our family life, and we enjoyed her cheerful company. She did not have the fighting mind of the Manitoban musketeers. She would certainly not end up in philosophy at Laval University. But she was kind-hearted, she loved the children, who loved her, and was an altogether pleasant person. She remains a friend to this day. — A person of great sensibility, she took some time to open up her deeper feelings. When she did, I was dumbfounded to hear that she had found firm ground in a course where I had felt so hopelessly out touch with my new students. Come to think of it, at the class Christmas party, the girls (who were studying to be nurses) had congratulated me for being a teacher who illustrated his subject matter clearly and was easy to understand. But I took this as a kindly remark inspired by the spirit of Christmas. I felt too ill at ease and out of touch with my students to imagine that it could be true.
