Period Of My Life Research Articles

Crossing the River: Essays in Honour of Margaret Laurence. ed. by Kristjana Gunnars

REVIEWS Kristjana Gunnars, ed., Crossing ihe River: Essays in Honour of Margaret Laurence. (Winnipeg: Turnstone Press, 1988). xvi, 213. $12.95 (paper). Collections of essays have poured out in honour of Margaret Laurence in the years following her death in 1987. One of the most interesting of these is Crossing the River: Essays in Honour of Margaret Laurence, edited by poet, novelist, editor, translator, and critic Kristjana Gunnars for Turnstone Press. Originally, Gunnars intended, upon hearing of Laurence’s terminal illness, to produce a Manitoba Festschrift, a tribute by Laurence’s fellow Manitobans to be placed in her hands. After learning of Laurence’s death, Gunnars broadened the scope of the collection to include essays from writers across Canada and beyond: It was somehow important to show our appreciation for what she had accomplished in her life. Margaret Laurence has been a founding mother of Canadian literature. She has given voice to the Manitoba prairie. She has raised the value of till sectors of society by showing the full humanity of the most neglected and forgotten among us. From her example we have learned the value of Canadian literature and culture; the importance of art to that culture; the necessity of honesty in a dangerous time in history; the truth of fiction and poetry. Perhaps her greatest gift has been the way in which she showed us the depths and passions of the place in which we are living: Manitoba, through her, has taken full part in the human drama. We no longer needed to look elsewhere. (viii) Including twelve essays in all, all previously unpublished, the collection is structured within the framework of an introductory and a concluding article focussing on Margaret Laurence as a person in her earlier and in her last years: “Knowing through Writing: The Pilgrimage of Margaret Laurence” by Walter Swayze and “The Final Days: Margaret Laurence and Scandi­ navia” by Per Seyersted. In “Knowing through Writing: The Pilgrimage of Margaret Laurence,” Swayze focusses on the Christian convictions that, he argues, underlie all of her fiction. Her protagonists, while critical of Christian conventions, “at moments of abject hopelessness experience what seem to be Christian E n g lish St u d ie s in C a n a d a , x v iii, 3, Septem ber 1992 illuminations and gain a sense of freedom and strength to go on confidently, evenjoyously” (9). Swayzeasserts that, in her later years, Laurence acknowl­ edged that “most of her convictions were Christian, that she really believed in Divine Grace, and that she wanted to join publicly in Christian worship in her local community” (10). Swayze shares with the reader Laurence’s last words from her 1986 Manitoba convocation address: Know that your commitment is above all to life itself. Your own life and work and loves will someday come to an end, but life and work and love will go on, in your inheritors. The struggle for peace and social justice will go on, provided that caring humans still live. . . . You are among my inheritors. I give you my deepest blessings, my hope and my faith. (21) In “The Final Days: Margaret Laurence and Scandinavia,” Seyersted cel­ ebrates the typical courage and generosity with which Laurence faced death. In a letter to Seyersted dated November 18, 1986, just six weeks before her death, Laurence explains that the diagnosis of terminal cancer prevents her from attending a Scandinavian seminar on The Stone Angel. She concludes courageously: In this period of my life, I sometimes feel regretful that I won’t have more time, and I hate the “passage”, even though I am deeply a Christian, albeit an unorthodox one. I don’t believe in an individual immortality, but I do believe in the Holy Spirit. This has been shown to me over and over again in the last months. I feel sometimes overwhelmed by love. In this terrifying world, I still feel that there is hope. (212) The remaining ten essays provide a rich variety of topics and approaches. Approximately half the articles focus on individual novels, while the other half discuss general topics. The Stone Angel deserves two essays — “Hagar ’s Old Age: The Stone Angel as Vollendungsroman” by...

Fluctuations at low temperatures

The London prize committee cites a number of my works under the common term “fluctuations”. Research under the general heading of “fluctuations” has followed a different course during different periods of my life. I am deeply indebted to many people who have contributed to and participated in the research projects that have been cited; among them there were my professors and my students. I would like to acknowledge them and to talk about these people in conjunction with the physical problems on which we worked, stressing that for me these people, their personality and my intellectual activities were inseparable.

Phantom Transmissions: The Radio Broadcasts of Ezra Pound

Two years before he died, Ezra Pound added a brief Foreword to 1970 edition of his memoir of sculptor, Gaudier-Brzeska. His final assessment of memoir, which was originally published in 1916, is almost apologetic in tone: it falls into place as a on what was visible to one in 1913 and 14-a footnote to an era he once called the romantic period of my life (RB 245). That Pound describes memoir as work of a spectator is a modest claim, indeed, for a work whose polemical vigor often disturbs task of mourning. The unassuming yet anomalous presence of this stranger, who appears for first time in appended Foreword, alerts reader to a silent breach, a schism, in one who remembers dead.

Medical Student Abuse

To the Editor.— In reference to the recent article by Rosenberg and Silver,1isn't it remarkable that so few of the surveyed medical school deans thought that medical student abuse occurred at their respective institutions? One wonders if they remember their own medical education. I have never met a physician that has not at least witnessed abuse of medical students. How many of us have not seen the shy third-year clerk bullied, berated, and at times humiliated simply for the inability to deliver a polished case presentation or because he or she displayed less than encyclopedic knowledge when grilled by the department chairman on rounds? Because of an extended stint in the military, I did not start college until I was 28 years old. I will always remember my undergraduate years as one of the most enlightening and enjoyable periods of my life. Although I graduated from medical school

Some Recollections of Sir William Osler at Oxford

Two separate periods of my life brought me into frequent contact with Sir William Osler, with ample opportunity to feel and see the influence of his powerful mind and personality on myself, my friends, and colleagues in the Oxford medical school. The first period was when I was a preclinical student in 1905 to 1908. Osler was in his late fifties, and full of vigor, having come to Oxford as Regius Professor of Medicine in 1904. We were a very small band of medical students, not more than 20, I think, in the whole University—itself less than 3,000 students. I myself had taken my degree in jurisprudence (law), and had moved over enthusiastically to medicine. At that time the University offered only a preclinical course, of which, however, the physiology course was reputed the best in the country. In this setting, Osler's clinical preeminence made little impact on us, though

Addressed the meeting, December 9,1858

Gentlemen, Although I have already had the opportunity of offering to you my thanks for the great honour which you have conferred on me in placing me in this Chair, it is but fit that I should repeat them now, when we are assembled in a more formal manner, and when probably some Fellows are present who were not present at the Anniversary dinner. It is impossible that I should be otherwise than highly gratified by such an expression of the good opinion of a Society, which may justly be regarded as including a larger proportion of individuals distinguished for their knowledge and intelligence than any other in this country. At the same time I must own that my feelings on the occasion are somewhat modified when I see around me so many of our Fellows who have devoted their lives to scientific pursuits, and who in their respective departments have contributed so much more than I have done to the advancement of scientific knowledge. It is now long since the requirements of an arduous profession, and the public not less than the private duties belonging to it, compelled me to direct my attention to other objects, and in a great degree to relinquish those researches, to which during many previous years l had been able to devote a large portion of my time, and which were to me the chief objects of interest during the early period of my life. Still, although I have ceased, except to a limited extent, to be a labourer in that field of science in which I laboured formerly, I have never failed to sympathize with those who in this respect were more happily situated, and to regard with satisfaction, or I ought rather to say with admiration, the grand results at which they have arrived in extending the boundaries of human knowledge. If it were possible for any one of that small but illustrious band of philosophers,—who just two centuries ago were associated in Gresham College for the purpose of mutually communicating and receiving knowledge, and who there laid the foundation of the Society which is now assembled—to revisit the scene of his former labours, we may well conceive the delight which it would afford him to learn that the success of that noble enterprise had been so much greater than his most sanguine aspirations could have led him to anticipate. Not only would he find an ample development of sciences which were then in the embryo state of their existence, but he wrould find other sciences, not inferior to these in interest and importance, added to the list. He would find that, instead of a limited number of individuals who were then occupied with scientific inquiries, whose labours were held in little estimation by the general public, and even held to be objects of ridicule by the presumptuous and ignorant, there is now a large number devoted to the same pursuits, and successfully applying to them the highest powers of the human intellect. He would perceive that, instead of being confined as it were to a corner, the love of knowledge is gradually becoming extended throughout the length and breadth of the land; and that, of those whose position does not afford them the opportunity of penetrating to the inmost recesses of the temple of science, there are many who, having advanced as far as the vestibule, are enabled even there to obtain their reward, in the improvement of their own minds, and in being rendered more useful members of the community.