Passages: Welcome Home to Canada Read Online Free PDF

moment, and perhaps are still if we view the crisis as long-term and global, then is it asking too much for us to be Africans too, when that continent is in crisis? Or Indians or Chinese, if the occasion demands? Is it so morally reprehensible or unpatriotic to be aware of all one’s origins and therefore care about a larger world, to care especially about the poorer segments of the globe, whence one has come, and to which one has not repaid any debt?
    That, ultimately, is my defence, my plea for redemption. I have justified my equivocation, my heresy, by saying that it is natural and inevitable in the modern world, which is so interconnected and so fraught with dangers that arise from differences among peoples. The justification is what I have arrived at, but the sin is a matter of the heart, is what I am.

Alberto
Manguel
DESTINATION ITHACA
    T HE TROGLODYTES WHO , along with the mammoth and the sabre-toothed tiger, wandered into Russia across the Bering Strait; the ancient South Americans who (according to Thor Heyerdahl) arrived on the rocks of Easter Island and mysteriously erected the colossal faces of their abandoned gods; the Italian boy from Edmundo d’Amici’s
Cuore
who travelled from the Apennines to the Andes in search of his long-lost mother; the Jews who crossed the desert, following a column of dust by day and a column of fire by night; Aeneas who, with his father on his back, blindly sought to found the birthplace of the poet who would one day make him immortal; General Lavalle’s soldiers, who carried the rotting corpse of their heroic leader from the mountainous North to the plains of Buenos Aires, during the Wars of Independence; Nemo, who bore his anger twenty thousand leagues beneath the seven seas; Candide on his long peregrinations whose goal (he doesn’t knowthis) is a garden; Monkey, Horse and Pig, who walked westwards to India in search of the sacred books; Eric the Red, who discovered America too early for the constraints of history; the brother and sister who left their house to find the elusive Blue Bird—all my childhood long, I was haunted by wanderers and their migrations. My books were full of them.
    They fascinated me, these departures, partly because every excursion promised a flight from the confines of my days, and partly because the outcome of the adventure was somehow still in the future, where everything was possible. It seemed to me that no arrival was the true end of the story: Gulliver set off again after having returned from his travels, and Alice, after waking, passed her dream on to her sister, whose dreamer she had become. Something in the very roundness of the world suggests that every journey is always to be continued.
    Even though I grew up travelling, the wisdom around me told me that I should stand still in one place.
“Kosmopolitt!”
spat out my grandmother, to insult a distant cousin who had never sprung roots in any of the cities in which he had lived.
“A Man Should Only Eat Bread from Wheat Grown on His Native Land”
was the title of one of the texts in my grade four reading book (this in Argentina, a country madeup of immigrants). And our national epic, the
Martín Fierro
, gave as advice to its readers: “Stick to the little corner / Where you first came to this earth. / A cow that keeps changing pastures / Will be late in giving birth.” But what was that corner where I first came to this earth? My passport said “Buenos Aires”; in my dreams I was not so certain.
    My earliest memories are of a wild park of sandy dunes where bushes of pink and white flowers gave off a sickly smell, and where giant tortoises made their slow way to the hot sea beyond. Also: a garden with four tall palm trees carrying bunches of deep yellow nuts; a cool, dark basement nursery with stuffed animals and many books; a large white kitchen where the cook would give me chunks of cheese and baking chocolate.
    My memories are memories of memories; repetition has sorted them out,