Laudator Temporis Acti

Sarah Raza, " Millions of Americans may now also be considered Canadian under a new law," AP (April 23, 2026):

Previously, Canadian citizenship by descent could only be passed down to one generation, from a parent to a child. But the new law opened up citizenship to anyone born before that date who could prove they have a direct Canadian ancestor — a grandparent, great-grandparent or even more distant ancestor.

According to DNA analysis, my ancestry is 48% French Canadian. My nearest relative born in Canada is my maternal grandmother, Yvonne Aurore Hélie (1900-1999), a native of Quebec. Quebec didn't issue birth certificates until recently, but the church register of L'église de la Visitation-de-la-Sainte-Vierge, in Pointe-du-Lac, contains the record of my grandmother's baptism (thanks to a Canadian friend for deciphering the handwriting; click once or twice to enlarge, entry B-37 at lower right corner):

Le vingt sept août mil neuf
cent. nous, prêtre, curé, soussigné
avons baptisé Marie Aurore
Yvonne, née le même jour de
baptisme. mariage de Alphonse
Helie et de Marie Louise Benoit
de cette paroisse. Parrain
Emile Dupont. Marraine
Aurore Benoit qui ont signé
avec nous. Le père a déclaré
ne savoir signer.

    Aurore Benoit
    Emile Dupont
        J. Caron, Ptr curé

Ptr = presbyter or prêtre. For the identity of the priest who performed the baptism see Jean-Baptiste-Arthur Allaire, Dictionnaire biographique du clergé canadien-français: Les contemporains (St Hyacinthe: Imprimerie de "La Tribune", 1908), p. 104:

CARON (L'abbé Joseph), né à Louiseville, comté de Maskinongé, le 25 avril 1855, de Thomas Caron, cultivateur, et d'Émélie Lesieur-Désaulniers, fit ses études à Saint-Hyacinthe; fut ordonné dans sa paroisse natale par Mgr Laflèche, le 29 août 1880. Professeur, directeur des élèves, des séminaristes, et aumônier des Sœurs Sainte-Marthe au séminaire de Saint Hyacinthe (1880-1891); curé de Régina dans la Saskatchewan (1891-1894); exécuta le tour du monde en 1894; aumônier de l'hôpital des Trois-Rivières (1894-1898); depuis 1898, curé de la Pointe-du-Lac, où il a parachevé le presbytère en 1898 et l'église en 1900. Maître-ès-arts de l'université de Québec (1891).

Photograph of L'église de la Visitation-de-la-Sainte-Vierge in Pointe-du-Lac: My grandmother also appears in the 1901 census of Canada, under the name Ivonne Helie (click once or twice to enlarge, row number 3): Row number 1 is my grandmother's sister Alice (1898-2002), whom I also remember fondly.

My grandmother's obituary says she was born in Yamachiche. See the following map for the proximity of Yamachiche to Pointe-du-Lac:

[J.] Enoch Powell (1912-1998), No Easy Answers (London: Sheldon Press, 1973), p. 116:

From pulpits throughout the land they [the Christian laity] hear homilies on trade unions and industrial relations, on housing, on economics and productivity, on politics and trade—all of them subjects in which the clergy as such have no special competence and about which in consequence many of those whom they address understand a great deal more than they do. 'Why?' ask the laity. 'Surely it is to avoid having to talk to us about that which is the sole reason and justification for their calling: the doctrine and sacraments of the Church. It is their escapism.' This more and more fervent desire of the clergy to be heard talking about, and concerning themselves in, the business of the hour—and incidentally, in doing so, to be seen wearing the fashionable clothing of the hour—is the symptom of a flight from their own business.

Id., p. 118:

More and more the Church—and not, so far as I see, only in England—has tried to be heard by saying and doing anything and everything but what it alone can say and do. Not surprisingly, it is heard less and less. Is it too late for it to be itself again?

Related post: Politics and the Pulpit.

Plato, Laws 10.888a-b (tr. Trevor J. Saunders):

Now then, my lad, you're still young, and as time goes on you'll come to adopt opinions diametrically opposed to those you hold now.

ὦ παῖ, νέος εἶ, προϊὼν δέ σε ὁ χρόνος ποιήσει πολλὰ ὧν νῦν δοξάζεις μεταβαλόντα ἐπὶ τἀναντία τίθεσθαι.

Lucan, Pharsalia 3.55-56 (tr. J.D. Duff):

He knew that the causes of hatred and mainsprings of popularity are determined by the price of food.

gnarus et irarum causas et summa favoris
annona momenta trahi.

Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), "The Universal Exhibition of 1855: the Fine Arts," Selected Writings on Art and Literature, tr. P.E. Charvet (1972; rpt. London: Penguin Books, 2006), pp. 115-139 (at 118):

Everyone can easily understand that, if the men whose function it is to express beauty were to conform to the rules laid down by the self-appointed pedagogues, beauty itself would disappear from the earth, since all types, all ideas, all sensations would merge into one vast monotonous and impersonal unity, as limitless as boredom and nothingness. Variety, that indispensable condition of life, would be expunged from life. So true is it that in the manifold productions of art, there is something always new, something that will eternally escape from the rules and the analyses of the school! Surprise, which is one of the greatest sources of enjoyment produced by art and literature, derives from this very variety of forms and sensations. The self-appointed pedant, a species of tyrant-mandarin, always reminds me of an impious wretch setting himself up as God.

Tout le monde conçoit sans peine que, si les hommes chargés d'exprimer le beau se conformaient aux règles des professeurs-jurés, le beau lui-même disparaîtrait de la terre, puisque tous les types, toutes les idées, toutes les sensations se confondraient dans une vaste unité, monotone et impersonnelle, immense comme l'ennui et le néant. La variété, condition sine quâ non de la vie, serait effacée de la vie. Tant il est vrai qu'il y a dans les productions multiples de l'art quelque chose de toujours nouveau qui échappera éternellement à la règle et aux analyses de l'école! L'étonnement, qui est une des grandes jouissances causées par l'art et la littérature, tient à cette variété même des types et des sensations. — Le professeur-juré, espèce de tyran-mandarin, me fait toujours l'effet d'un impie qui se substitue à Dieu.

C.S. Lewis, letter to his brother Warren (Dec. 18, 1939):

During the evening Ridley read to us a Swinburne ballad and, immediately after it, that ballad of Kipling’s which ends up 'You’ve finished with the flesh, my Lord'.

Nobody except me knew who the second one was by, and everyone agreed that it just killed the Swinburne as a real thing kills a sham. I then made him read 'Iron, cold iron' with the same result and later he drifted into McAndrew's Hymn. Surely Kipling must come back? When people have had time to forget 'If' and the inferior Barrack Room Ballads, all this other stuff must come into its own. I know hardly any poet who can deliver such a hammer stroke. The stories, of course, are another matter and are, I suppose, even now admitted to be good by all except a handful of Left idiots.

C.S. Lewis, letter to his brother Warren (Dec. 3, 1939):

After years of estrangement I found myself this week going back to Horace, who has at least this advantage that a single ode makes just the right length of reading for the odd five minutes before a pupil appears, or between the last pupil and dinner. I suppose the first lines would still wake in you as they do in me a flood of reminiscence—Solvitur acris hiems—O fons Bandusiae—Vides ut alta stet nive candidum: and even the first lines of odes one never read at school such as Cum tu Lydia Telphi [sic, read Telephi].

[Walter Scott], anonymous review of The Forester's Guide and Profitable Planter. By Robert Monteath. (With Plates.) Second Edition. Edinburgh, 1824, in Quarterly Review 36 (October 1827) 558–600, rpt. in The Miscellaneous Prose Works of Sir Walter Scott, Vol. I (Edinburgh: Robert Cadell, 1841), pp. 32-49 (at 34, col. 2):

We have ourselves seen an account of a sale of growing trees upon an estate in this district where the proceeds amounted to no less than six thousand pounds, a very large sum considering that the country was overstocked with wood, the demands for it confined to those of rural economy, and the means of transporting it extremely imperfect. There must have been a fall of large and valuable timber to have produced such a sum under such circumstances. The guardians of the noble proprietor, when they made the sale, seem to have given directions for enclosing the natural wood, with a view to its preservation. Nevertheless, about seventy or eighty years afterwards, there was scarcely in existence, upon the whole property, a twig sufficient to make a walking-stick, so effectually had the intentions of the guardians been baffled, and their instructions neglected. It may be some explanation of this wilful waste, that a stocking of goats (of all other creatures the most destructive to wood) had been put upon the ground after cutting the trees. But to speak the truth, agriculture, as Mr Shandy says of the noble science of defence, has its weak points. Those who pursue one branch of the art are apt to become bigoted and prejudiced against every thing which belongs to another, though no less essential, department. The arable cultivator, for example, has a sort of pleasure in rooting up the most valuable grass land, even where the slightest reflection might assure him that it would be more profitable to reserve it for pasture. The store-farmer and shepherd, in the same manner, used formerly to consider every spot occupied by a tree as depriving the flock of a certain quantity of food, and not only nourished malice against the woodland, but practically laboured for its destruction; and to such lamentable prejudices on the part of farmers, and even of proprietors, is the final disappearance of the natural forests of the north chiefly to be attributed. The neglect of enclosure on the side of the landlord; the permitted, if not the authorized, invasions of the farmer; the wilful introduction of sheep and cattle into the ground where old trees formerly stood, have been the slow, but effectual, causes of the denuded state of extensive districts, which, in their time, were tracts of what the popular poetry of the country called by the affectionate epithet of "the good green wood." Still, however, the facts of such forests having existed, ought now, in more enlightened times, to give courage to the proprietor, and stimulate him in his efforts to restore the silvan scenes which ignorance, prejudice, indolence, and barbarism combined to destroy.

Hat tip: Eric Thomson.

Labels: arboricide

Walter Scott (1771-1832), The Antiquary, chap. III:

'These little Elzevirs are the memoranda and trophies of many a walk by night and morning through the Cowgate, the Canongate, the Bow, Saint Mary's Wynd, — wherever, in fine, there were to be found brokers and trokers, those miscellaneous dealers in things rare and curious. How often have I stood haggling on a halfpenny, lest, by a too ready acquiescence in the dealer's first price, he should be led to suspect the value I set upon the article! — how have I trembled, lest some passing stranger should chop in between me and the prize, and regarded each poor student of divinity that stopped to turn over the books at the stall, as a rival amateur, or prowling bookseller in disguise! — And then, Mr. Lovel, the sly satisfaction with which one pays the consideration, and pockets the article, affecting a cold indifference, while the hand is trembling with pleasure! — Then to dazzle the eyes of our wealthier and emulous rivals by showing them such a treasure as this — (displaying a little black smoked book about the size of a primer) — to enjoy their surprise and envy, shrouding meanwhile under a veil of mysterious consciousness our own superior knowledge and dexterity — these, my young friend, these are the white moments of life, that repay the toil, and pains, and sedulous attention, which our profession, above all others, so peculiarly demands!'

Yamanoue Okura (660?–733?), "The impermanence of human life," tr. Geoffrey Bownas and Anthony Thwaite:

We are helpless in this world.
The years and months slip past
Like a swift stream, which grasps and drags us down.
A hundred pains pursue us, one by one.
Girls, with their wrists clasped round
With Chinese jewels, join hands
And play their youth away.
But time cannot be stopped,
And when their youth is gone
Their jet-black hair — black as fish's bowels —
Turns white, like a hard frost.
On their sun-browned, glowing faces,
Wrinkles are etched — by whom?
Boys, with their swords at their waists,
Clutching the hunting bow,
Mount their chestnut horses
On saddles linen-spun,
And ride on in their pride.
But is their world eternal?
He pushes back the door
Where a girl sleeps within,
Gropes to her side and lies
Arm on her jewel arm.
But how few are those nights
Before, with stick at waist,
He goes shunned and detested —
The old are always so.
We grudge life moving on
But we have no redress.
I would become as those
Firm rocks that see no change.
But I am a man in time
And time must have no stop.