The narrator of The Glass Canoe, a novel by Australian David Ireland, spends much of his time in a Sydney pub puzzling over life as he is carried along the glass canoe of his beer stein. He wonders about how and why things happen, such as how a record player always knows to put the needle exactly at the edge of a record, or how much force is created by acres and acres of grass on a golf course all growing upwards at once, or why light always travels at the same speed, or why light wants to bother escaping from where it was in the first place. He admires the people who are creative and imaginative, and he speaks of the of human understanding. As a reader, teacher, and sometimes wonderer, was especially interested in the narrator's comments about Danny, one of his pub mates, who spends his nonwork hours in a beery stupor, but who, on Saturdays, is a brilliant rugby player. I can tell you that has awe and majesty, the narrator writes, something so close to magic that bet no one can put it into all the words needed to describe it: