Rediscovered book on UVic history opens a world of experience
I’m sure if we thought about it carefully, we could think of a few benefits COVID-19 has brought us — less air pollution from the docking of cruise ships, more time to chat with your neighbour, and more pets finding their forever homes (all that’s left to adopt seems to be a few little mice!).
Here’s another benefit — sorting out your books. And if you happen to discover a book by a local author, it just might provide you with a new activity or skill to try, a place to visit, new social interaction, or a new thought to ponder over.
This series of essays discusses local books and how they might introduce you to something new or special in these strange times of the COVID pandemic. Books can provide us with a great security blanket to help us get through these surreal days.
I recently found a big glossy copy of Reaching Outward and Upward: The University of Victoria, 1963-2013 by Ian MacPherson (McGill-Queen’s University Press 2012).
Granted, some parts of the book are dry and academic, especially the descriptions and photos of past presidents in their black suits, short haircuts and glasses all doing the same conservative pose — almost smiling as if afraid to show any teeth, at a bare, tidy desk, their folded hands on top of a neat paper folder, an important file of some sort, maybe the budget for the faculty of economics.
However, the book is a fun compilation about one of my favourite places, our university. There’s something about walking through the grounds of a higher-education institution that is incredibly stimulating. It’s as if all the knowledge concentrated in this one area permeates the air and you can just breathe it all in and expand your mind.
I come alive when I walk around UVic — and sometimes, at age 63, I have an extremely strong urge to return to school, to earn another degree, this time in art history, or philosophy, yes, the philosophy of art — now there’s a topic I’d do well in were it not for the logic courses.
So I spent a lovely autumn afternoon at the university after dusting off this book. Thankfully, the smoke from the southern wildfires had blown away, and the university grounds provided a beautiful peaceful stroll.
There’s much one can do at a university besides study — there’s the gardens and the forested walks, there’s the wonderful bookstore, little coffee shops that sell delicious local muffins, and the cinema in the evening, there’s the diverse architecture, and First Nations culture (and downtown is UVic’s own Legacy Art Gallery).
I used to take Mum to the Faculty Club, the lovely quiet low-lit lounge that had the slight fragrance of cedar and overlooked the flat clean granite patio and Japanesestyle pond surrounded by our native woodland. We’d sit in the tasteful upholstered beige square chairs with chilled glasses of white wine and Mum (who was visiting from New Brunswick) would swoon: “My god, I love the West Coast.”
One way you can participate in the university environment is to take a course from their continuing education program.
I have signed up for a face-to face course on travel sketching (if a sketching course wasn’t face to face, I might think I was enrolled with Bob Ross).
Perhaps it will open up a new hobby for me, despite the fact that travel is limited. Local sketching will suffice — the turtles sunning themselves on their log in Beacon Hill Park, or the pale mauve wild asters, jutting from the now summer-bleached tawny dew-soaked grasses in the meadows of Dallas Road, or at the grocery store, the silent, almost ghost-like masked lineups, people dutifully waiting between a little table of hand sanitizer and the white buckets of crimson and yellow gladioli.
All these memories and thoughts, ideas and ventures, provoked by thumbing through the great glossy pages of a book discovered at the back of the shelf among dustballs, cat hair and a few dead flies.
This is a time to reflect on the little pleasures in our lives, and to embark on them. This is what books can do!