books to lead a nation by.
i love this:
Who is this man? What makes him tick? No doubt he is busy. No doubt he is deluded by that busyness. No doubt being Prime Minister fills his entire consideration and froths his sense of busied importance to the very brim. And no doubt he sounds and governs like one who cares little for the arts.
But he must have moments of stillness. And so this is what I propose to do: not to educate—that would be arrogant, less than that—to make suggestions to his stillness.
For as long as Stephen Harper is Prime Minister of Canada, I vow to send him every two weeks, mailed on a Monday, a book that has been known to expand stillness. That book will be inscribed and will be accompanied by a letter I will have written. I will faithfully report on every new book, every inscription, every letter, and any response I might get from the Prime Minister, on this website.
and so it is that yann martel (the author who gained notoriety for his quirky exploration of spirituality, shipwreckage and the animal kingdom (including the human animal) in the book “life of pi” has made a “vow” to send canada’s conservative prime minister a book that encourages “stillness” every two weeks, for as long as stephen harper (said canadian prime minister) remains canada’s prime minister.
what an interesting idea! check out the website to see what yann martel suggests as reading materiel to one of canada’s most peculiar prime ministers, including the explanatory letters that he sends along with each suggestion (and don’t forget to read his explanation of what inspired the idea in the first place).
the short story is that mr. martel and some artsy-fartsy friends (50 of canada’s most impressive professional artists to be exact, who had a one point in the last 50 years received government funding to help them realize one of their works of art) were in the house of commons (canada’s hq for politics) to honour what the canada council for the arts has done to enrich canada’s cultural heritage and legacy … an homage to the arts, then, and arts funding, culture, life and whatnot …
yann the man realized on this day that “stillness” is a crucial ingredient to art (at least the appreciation of it, but certainly also the creation of it), but that unfortunately mr. prime minister harper probably had very little time for stillness in his busy country-leading lifestyle — something mr. yann the martel thought was unfortunate (for everybody, i am imagining). i can’t resist quoting him some more, since he really does explain it well:
On March 28th, 2007, at 3 pm, I was sitting in the Visitors’ Gallery of the House of Commons, I and forty-nine other artists from across Canada, fifty in all, and I got to thinking about stillness. To read a book, one must be still. To watch a concert, a play, a movie, to look at a painting, one must be still. Religion, too, makes use of stillness, notably with prayer and meditation. Just gazing upon a still lake, upon a quiet winter scene—doesn’t that lull us into contemplation? Life, it seems, favours moments of stillness to appear on the edges of our perception and whisper to us, “Here I am. What do you think?” Then we become busy and the stillness vanishes, yet we hardly notice because we fall so easily for the delusion of busyness, whereby what keeps us busy must be important, and the busier we are with it, the more important it must be. And so we work, work, work, rush, rush, rush. On occasion we say to ourselves, panting, “Gosh, life is racing by.” But that’s not it at all, it’s the contrary: life is still. It is we who are racing by.
I was thinking about that, about stillness, and I was also thinking, more prosaically, about arts funding, not surprising since we fifty artists were there in the House to help celebrate the fifty years of the Canada Council for the Arts, that towering institution that has done so much to foster the identity of Canadians. I was thinking that to have a bare-bones approach to arts funding, as the present Conservative government has, to think of the arts as mere entertainment, to be indulged in after the serious business of life, that—in conjunction with retooling education so that it centres on the teaching of employable skills rather than the creating of thinking citizens—is to engineer souls that are post-historical, post-literate and pre-robotic; that is, blank souls wired to be unfulfilled and susceptible to conformism at its worst—intolerance and totalitarianism—because incapable of thinking for themselves, and vowed to a life of frustrated serfdom at the service of the feudal lords of profit.
and so yann martel suggests all sorts of important works of literature, from agatha christie (yes!) to art spiegelman, to voltaire, to tolstoy ( … and there are more; go check it out!).
it seems that to date mr. harper’s assistant has responded to only one (the first) of mr. yann’s book suggestions.
i wonder if mr.stephen harper is actually reading these books (if not, i hope that at least his assistant is, and that she is subsequently de-briefing him on all the wonderful stillness she is experiencing thanks to them).
i have always cherished book suggestions from others, and so i think this idea is absolutely lovely. i really do wonder what harper thinks of all this?!
: )
