Paidika

A treat from Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel, which I was reading this afternoon in Toronto’s Philosopher’s Walk by my office building:

My shreds and remnants of years are scattered through it visibly in lamps and vases, the needle-point fire bench, the heavy oak chair from the Shipley place, the china cabinet and walnut sideboard from my father’s house. … If I am not somehow contained in them and in this house, something of all change caught and fixed here, eternal enough for my purposes, then I do not know where I am to be found at all.

More to come later on Asianist versus Atticist prose in Canadian literature.