Sacrifice and spring walks
The approach of Easter brings thoughts of the afterlife, brotherhood, sacrifice, betrayal, and walking through the city in spring.
February-March 2022
February really sneaks past you. Just those 2-3 missing days and suddenly you’re in March before you know it. So I’m doing another double-month newsletter this month.
It got me thinking about self-imposed deadlines. On the one hand, the point is to help you focus on getting something written. On the other hand, part of my delay was not feeling inspired – and there’s no point subjecting people to one’s writing simply out of a sense of obligation. It’s a kind of creative tension. Fortunately, the approach of Easter revealed some connections, and ideas started to fall into place.
The Sneak Peek
I’m currently editing a fascinating translation into English of a Hebrew poem written in seventeenth-century Italy. The poem, Hell Arrayed, is a Dante-like voyage through the underworld, except that the protagonist is a sinner and so is actually experiencing the tortures of the afterlife and the seven layers of hell his demonic guide is revealing to him. It is colourful, to say the least. Apparently there is a layer of hell for “teachers who interrupt study with mundane talk,” along with more conventional sins.
The translation is by an Italian scholar who works in the US. Editing work in English by scholars who are not native speakers is a fascinating insight into the peculiarities of my native language. For example, when to use “the.” Even mediocre native English writers almost always get it right, but non-native speakers, even those with excellent English, often have a hard time knowing when to use it and when not to. There are the prepositions – the choice of which one to use in which context (on? of? in? for?) is often completely arbitrary. And then there are the shades of meaning – a word that seems perfectly reasonable from its dictionary definition, yet reads wrong, and some near-synonym is actually what’s needed. Even word order can be arbitrary – sometimes what should be the most logical progression of thoughts simply doesn’t work in English. Yet English has become a de facto international language, and scholars across the world are often forced to struggle with it. Many do so remarkably well despite the challenges, and I’m glad I am sometimes able to assist.
The Tidbit
Just over a decade ago, my wife Molly and I visited Israel. We happened to end up there during a rare double-Easter, when the Western and Orthodox Easters coincided, bringing pilgrims from a remarkable range of different countries together in Jerusalem. One of the sites we visited (after being bullied in the lineup by a gang of Romanian grandmothers) was the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, built where Christ is reputed to have been buried after his crucifixion. The church is literally divided between six different branches of Christianity, who each jealously guard their own portion. We were entertained by stories of their confrontations over territory, such as who got to sweep a particular flagstone, but at the same time that endless rivalry over a holy site was kind of depressing.
So it was heartwarming to read that some of the competing sects are now learning to work together cooperatively in order to renovate those very flagstones. One of the things I found most interesting about the article is the quotation to the effect that it is the act of working together on a project that has helped to build trust between these former rivals. I’ve talked about something similar (on Nadia Halim’s podcast The Opposite of Lonely) – building connections and comfort with others through doing more than talking – in the context of loosely organized group walks I used to take part in around Toronto. Having a shared task – even as simple as strolling through the city – lifts the pressure of having to have “conversation” and instead integrates talking into a broader overall shared endeavour. Many strangers became friends on those companionable walks.
What’s Up
I’ve been writing about and advocating for making Toronto a better city for walking for two decades now, in various capacities. To use an obvious pun, it’s often one step forward, two steps back kind of work – while there have been steady improvements in some ways, the number of pedestrians injured and killed on my city’s streets has not been going down.
I’d been thinking about writing about the reasons for this situation, and finally got the needed spur when I was asked to write a column about pedestrian safety for Municipal World magazine in their new “Disruptors” column. It gave me a chance to talk about what I call “the pedestrian blood sacrifice” – the tendency to only get pedestrian safety improvements at a particular location after a pedestrian is killed there.
It was good to get this opportunity to put my thoughts together and share them, but they didn’t pay me for the op-ed, which came out in the January issue. The online version is behind a paywall, but since I wasn’t paid, and it is now a back issue, I think it’s fair to share it as a PDF – I hope some of you will read it!
Read “We can stop sacrificing pedestrians: Complete streets necessary to prevent pedestrian death toll” (PDF)
Pic Pick
I went on a walk with a city planner, on a muddy spring day, around Toronto’s Summerhill neighbourhood. It’s an area I thought I knew well - I lived nearby for a while and visited often because my parents lived there. But on this walk I was introduced to a wildly neglected little linear park beside the train tracks that I never knew existed. Part of its length was divided from the street by an inexplicable chain-link fence. The vines loved it, but the trees clearly felt it did not belong, and this one is actively chomping the railing!
The Catch-Up
Illustration by Jake Tobin Garrett
In one of my first missives, I wrote about the Park People 10th anniversary series that I was editing, with features on great park projects by a wonderful range of urban writers across Canada. It wrapped up at the end of 2021, and I wrote a reflections piece to bookend it, looking at some of the themes that linked the stories together – continuous evolution, reinvention, learning, connections, and community: “Cities may provide the soil, but it’s communities that provide the seeds that make that land flourish.”
The Shout-Out
When I married Molly, I was inducted into her lifelong fascination with Russia. It’s been a wonderful learning experience – I have taught myself to read Cyrillic twice now, ahead of each of our visits there together. But Russia has been betrayed by its leader and his sycophants, and we may never be able to visit it again. Drawing on her many visits over the years, Molly wrote about this betrayal poignantly in the Globe and Mail: