Ian McDonald

It seems not a day, and certainly not a week, passes without our stomachs being turned by appalling news of women cruelly abused, beaten and, often enough, murdered in headline-hot, red blood.

Many of us at some time or another, generally in a new year, have resolved to “keep a diary,” probably as part of some grand and comprehensive plan to organize one’s life better and achieve great things – plans, I am afraid, which very soon run aground on the dangerous shoals of everyday living. 

Whenever you pass a Library, never fail to bestow a silent blessing on those who work within its rooms, quietly rendering service of inestimable value.

The diaries of William Gladstone, one of the greatest British Prime Ministers, are astonishing.

The world is endlessly fascinating, and countlessly full of interesting people.

Suddenly it is Christmas again. I am eighty-seven years old.  I find that ridiculous but chronologically it is a fact.

The spirit grows weary with the weight of woe in the world at large and here at home.

This week, it seems so soon again, I was saddened by the death of an old friend who often filled my life with laughter and good advice.

When I was young, and benefitted not only from a fresh and eagerly absorptive mind but also from a strong belief that an eternity of life stretched in front of me, I loved to read big books, books of immense length.

It is necessary to repeat again and again that in the background of all our lives there exists a fundamental and dominating lie.

In Guyana, as indeed elsewhere in the world, most of what is considered worthy of notice is shallow and of no long-term importance.

Nothing can compare with the beauty and warmth of life at home.

Toronto is a calm, clean, well-ordered, cosmopolitan, peaceful city.  If during a long weekend in this city of two and a half million people there are a couple of murders it would be an alarming law and order crisis. 

“The unexamined life is not worth living” – Socrates. When I was no more than twelve or thirteen the feeling grew in me that it was important not simply to live life day by day but somehow to give greater meaning to it by recording what was happening every one of those days and by planning how I should shape and what I should make of my life in the future.

                            for what else is there                 but books, books and the sea,                 verandahs and the pages of the sea                 to write of the wind and the memory                                          of wind whipped hair                 in the sun, the colour of fire.                                        Derek Walcott As I get older, the attractions of foreign travel and the lures of encountering new places and fresh faces have rapidly faded. 

Intermittently through the year, and especially during memorable times up the immense and soul-redeeming Essequibo, I like to read Shelley – as we all should do from time to time since he is pre-eminently the poet of hope.

Seventy years ago – can it be so many years, gone so quickly, insubstantial as a dream?

At a time when we mourn with their families the brutal murders of Isaiah and Joel Henry and Haresh Singh and Prettipaul Hargobin, I give my column to the words of Gladson Henry, father of Isaiah and uncle of Joel.

Seamus Heaney, the great Irish poet, whose marvelous collection of essays The Redress of Poetry I like to re-read, wrote that W.H.

To those in power, to command and control without question will often seem a more appealing option than to govern through consultation, tactical concession and necessary compromise.