Little Big Things

To be honest, I've always had a complex relationship with Remembrance Day. In my head, in a purely intellectual sense, I know that it falls every year on November 11, the anniversary of the official end of WWI, and is meant to be a time of reflection and thankfulness for the servicemen and -women who have fought and died for our country. I also know it to be a time when we pause to reflect on the continued physical, emotional, social and financial needs of our veterans, the oldest of whom have been hit particularly hard by the COVID-19 pandemic. However, if you were to ask me if that knowledge in my head ever made it down to my heart...hard to say. I suppose there were moments when it must have: like when I finally discovered, as a Grade 8 student, that Canadian forces were deployed in an attempt to defend Hong Kong from the Imperial Japanese during WWII ; or when the brother of a close friend I had in university was a soldier who could potentially be deployed to Afghanistan. But w...

  Monster. What comes to mind when you see that word? Maybe it's some eerie spectre or bloodthirsty creature: the one lurking in the darkness just out of the corner of your eye, yet never quite visible when you turn around to look. Maybe it's the supernatural and doomed Byronic hero: the one you know should repulse you, but who is far too alluring to resist. Or maybe, just maybe, it's the radicalized mass murderer: the one so deeply buried in their online echo chamber that you don't even know they exist until they suddenly burst out into the open, leaving death and destruction in their wake. For me, a monster can certainly be all of those things. Already, in my mind, I can hear some of the names. See some of the faces. And perhaps, given this time of year, you think this is where I plan to go. But it isn't. Not this year, nor any year either before or after. Because for me, when I hear the word "monster", I hear its root: Monstrare.  It's a Latin word ...

It might be strange to think of the absence of religion in a place like Québec: even though the province is now officially secular (and policy takes it to an extreme that has been roundly criticized by the rest of the country ), religion is a near-constant presence in its architecture. Since much of the population was historically Roman Catholic, there is no shortage of churches, crosses, and other forms of Christian iconography scattered throughout the landscape. Instead, when I speak of "faith in the absence of religion", I am referring more to myself. That seems to be the thing about this "Beauty in Stillness" series: three parts, each with its own distinct lens. In the first post about Vieux-Québec, I brought up the questions I had about "great man history"; in the second post about Montréal, I wanted to caution against looking at Indigenous-settler relations through the idyllic lens of the fur trade. This time, though, while Canada as a country is sti...