Eventually

Dear Eugene,

Two days ago right before I started reading the new David Adams Richards novel, I read in the news about a young man killing himself.

The headline says: "Shamed in his dog's death, Jeremy Quaile took his own life".  And this is how the article started:

"Jeremy Quaile's dog died alone, and it took several days for anyone to notice.

Five months later, Quaile died in much the same way.

He had no family and few close friends in Calgary. Like countless people who come to the city in search of opportunity, he left lifelong relationships behind and struggled to forge new ones as deep or as strong.

But you might remember his name; it was in the news last summer.

Or maybe you saw it on Facebook, alongside comments labelling him an "idiot," a "terrible person" and "human garbage." Strangers cast these judgments on him, knowing nothing of his life and little about the circumstances surrounding his dog's death. But of one thing they were certain: his pet died in a horrific way — left in a car for days during a summer heat wave — and that was all they needed to know."

For a moment I was confused.

I thought I was reading the new David Adams Richards novel already.  I wondered if the journalist was channeling the Canadian literary giant, our Hardy, our Tolstoy.

How do I describe the feeling of holding a David Adams Richards novel in my hands?

It weighs me down.

Sometimes I resist opening the pages, to expose myself so nakedly to revelations plain as day but seldom whispered even in the darkest of nights.  I know I will read about gross injustice done in a casual manner, little sins I am bound to commit in the next 24 hours that will snowball with the collective incidental transgressions of humans around me to eventually throw something--someone--off the cliff.

Eventually.

It will happen.  Maybe not today.  Maybe not me going down the cliff.  Not today anyway.  Maybe not even for a decade.

But eventually.

“[...]no one can do an injury to you without doing an injury to themselves.”  I highlighted this line, one of another hundred, in my second copy of his Giller Prize winner "Mercy Among the Children," a copy I bought exclusively for highlighting, because I hate to write on my books.

The man who killed himself was about my age.  It could have been me, I thought.

I mean being his killer.

"To eradicate God was not to make men equal — this is what many of us always pretend or are deluded by. The wisdom of those who have come to the conclusion that there is nothing but themselves have in the end usually little generosity to spare the masses. Even in the tavern talk of certain friends of the seventies, the new world, where we were all equal, where women were as capable as men of denouncing humanity (which was considered grave intelligence), there was always the idea that some would have to be eradicated, or left on the sidelines, or at least see our point of view. The secret we failed to grasp was that the only way we seemed able to have someone equal to ourselves was to diminish anyone who disagreed with us."

Amen.  Alex