Canadian Authors

"If someone were to ask me if I like Canadian authors, my answer, until recently would have been a resonding NO. I am learning though, that it is just Canadian Fiction writers I don't like. I have yet to find one whose second book I would read. Margaret Lawrence turned me off Canadian writers in high school and any I have read since have only worsened my opinion. In my humble opinion, Canadian writers should never write fiction.

I have learned though that they can and do write marvelous non-fiction. I am reading my third non-fiction book by a Canadian author. The first two were Mary of Canada by Jean Skogan and Home by Anny Scoones. The current one by Margaret Thompson is titled Knocking on the Moonlit Door - Reflections on Journeys to Europe and Other Destinations. This writer has a way with words that paints perfect pictures. I feel I would recognize each place she writes about if I were to be dropped into that spot without being told where I was going.

There is a philisophical quality to Margaret Thompson's work that also appeals to me. She is, in her writings, saying much more than just giving a physical description of the places she has seen. She is seeing beyond the physical reality to the very soul of the place and in doing so expresses something about the very nature of being:

We are rational beings,but so much of our best impulsesis born of our imagination,so much of the gilding of our lives, so much of its deepest truth. It has the power to raise the dead and deliver the unborn; create the impossible and destroy the actual; open the farthest reaches of the universe to our wondering eyes; unshackle us from our mortality and set us adrift in undiscovered worlds.

How much closer could we get to seeing with an angel's eyes?

An interesting point about the book, the title grabbed me "Knocking on the Moonlit Door". It wasn't until I skimmed the first chapter that I realized why. I can be a little slow at times!! It is a line from one of my favourite poems, The Listeners by Walter De La Mare.

'Is there anybody there?' said the Traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in the silence champ'd the grasses
Of the forest's ferny floor:
And a bird flew up out of the turret,
Above the Traveller's head:
And he smote upon the door again a second time;
'Is there anybody there?' he said.
But no one descended to the Traveller;
No head from the leaf-fringed sill
Lean'd over and look'd into his grey eyes,
Where he stood perplex'd and still.
But only a host of phantom listeners
That dwelt in the lone house then
Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight
To that voice from the world of men:
Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,
That goes down to the empty hall,
Hearkening in an air stirr'd and shaken
By the lonely Traveller's call.
And he felt in his heart their strangeness,
Their stillness answering his cry,
While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,
'Neath the starr'd and leafy sky;
For he suddenly smote on the door, even
Louder, and lifted his head:-
'Tell them I came, and no one answer'd,
That I kept my word,' he said.
Never the least stir made the listeners,
Though every word he spake
Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house
From the one man left awake:
Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,
And the sound of iron on stone,
And how the silence surged softly backward,
When the plunging hoofs were gone.

Who is the Traveller? Is it each of us?" I whisper.

Are you listening?