June 17, 2025: Accommodating yearning

From the spring 2025 edition of Geist comes an amazing piece of writing  from essayist Soraya Roberts, who documents a trip on the The Canadian, Canada’s only mostly trans-national train.

“This is about a transcontinental train, established 70 years ago, using the same cars to this day. It is about how trains became a relic in our national mind, which is how they came to be visibly trundling across the country, slowly connecting products rather than people, as the rest of the world surpasses us with better versions of what we left behind… This is about a vast country of people yearning for connection. But Canada has never, in its infinite practicality, accommodated yearning.”

You can read the full essay only in the print edition, so go buy one or grab it from your nearest Canadian library.

One of the my favourite blogs of all time was the daily commonplace book whiskey river. Whoever was behind that blog seems to have stopped posting in December. the last post was a quote from Louise Erdrich:

Get rid of everything.
If you exist, then you are loved
by existence. What do you need?
A spoon, a blanket, a bowl, a book –
maybe the book you give away.
Resist the need to worry, robbing everything
of immediacy and peace.
Resist traveling except where you want to go.
Resist seeing yourself in others or them in you.
Nothing, everything, is personal.

I have no idea who was behind this blog. It was a reliable and seasonable daily dose of incredible insight from a person who was extremely well read. The blog itself remains online and a collection of posts has been published as “whiskey river’s commonplace book.” The blog published from 2001 to 2024. The author remains deeply anonymous.

Early on in the blogging era many folks figured out this recipe: blogs as commonplace books. Mark Woods who lived in Perth, Ontario published “wood s lot: the fitful tracing of a portal.” Sadly, he died in 2017 but back in 2002 when he was struggling to find the money for a new computer so he could keep writing, Euan Semple all the way over in the UK sent him the money to buy a new PC. It was a lovely act, and reaffirmed what blogging always had been: generosity and connection. Another who blogged in the manner of whiskey river included Steve Laidlaw from Kamloops BC, who published the long gone “riley dog.”