"Snake" by DH Lawrence

 

A snake came to my water-trough

On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat,

To drink there.

 

In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob tree

I came down the steps with my pitcher

And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough

            before me.

 

He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the gloom

And trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down, over

            the edge of the stone trough

And rested his throat upon the stone bottom,

And where the water had dripped from the tap, in a small clearness,

He sipped with his straight mouth,

Softly drank through his straight gums, into his slack long body,

Silently.

 

Someone was before me at my water-trough,

And I, like a second-comer, waiting.

 

He lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do,

And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do,

And flickered his two-forked tongue from his lips, and mused

             a moment,

And stooped and drank a little more,

Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels

            of the earth

On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking.

 

The voice of my education said to me

He must be killed,

For in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent, the gold

            are venomous.

 

And voices in me said, If you were a man

You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off.

 

But must I confess how I liked him,

How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink

            at my water-trough

And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless,

Into the burning bowels of this earth?

 

Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him?

Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him?

Was it humility, to feel so honoured?

I felt so honoured.

 

And yet those voices:

If you were not afraid, you would kill him!

 

And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid,

But even so, honoured still more

That he should seek my hospitality

From out the dark door of the secret earth.

 

He drank enough

And lifted his head, dreamily, as one who has drunken,

And flickered his tongue like a forked night on the air, so black,

Seeming to lick his lips,

And looked around like a god, unseeing, into the air,

And slowly turned his head,

And slowly, very slowly, as if thrice adream,

Proceeded to draw his slow length curving round

And climb again the broken bank of my wall-face.

 

And as he put his head into that dreadful hole,

And as he slowly drew up, snake-easing his shoulders,

            and entered farther,

A sort of horror, a sort of protest against his withdrawing into

            that horrid black hole,

Deliberately going into the blackness, and slowly drawing

            himself after,

Overcame me now his back was turned.

 

I looked round, I put down my pitcher,

I picked up a clumsy log

And threw it at the water-trough with a clatter.

 

I think it did not hit him,

But suddenly that part of him that was left behind convulsed

            in an undignified haste,

Writhed like lightning, and was gone

Into the black hole, the earth-lipped fissure in the wall-front,

At which, in the intense still noon, I stared with fascination.

 

And immediately I regretted it.

I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act!

I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education.

 

And I thought of the albatross,

And I wished he would come back, my snake.

 

For he seemed to me again like a king,

Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,

Now due to be crowned again.

 

And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords

Of life.

And I have something to expiate:

A pettiness.

 

                                                                                                     Taormina

 

 

Visiting Place Alexis Nihon, 3 march 2010

The shopping plaza at Alexis Nihon

Place Alexis Nihon, Tower One, the solarium accessed from the shopping plaza

 

Adam Shoalts on Hubert Darrell, explorer

I highly recommend Adam Shoalts’ new book, Vanished Beyond the Map, The Mystery of Lost Explorer Hubert Darrell (2025). What a great book; largely a mystery (discovering the life story and possible fate of Hubert Darrell, an explorer of Canada's far north), it is also a celebration of Canada's north, and it is fascinating to read of the people who were Hubert Darrell's contemporaries.

Hubert Darrell is the son of Charles Darrell after whom the Montreal-born Beaver Hall artist, Darrell Morrisey, was named. Darrell Morrisey's father, T.L. Morrisey, was a business colleague of Charles Darrell. Here is more information on Darrell Morrisey. Below is possibly the only existing photograph of Hubert Darrell;

Hubert Darrell

Hubert Darrell

Note: Image restored and colourized by Chat GPT.

Old Age

 

Don't assume that growing old is the same for everyone, or that it will be a pleasant time of love and family. Some old people end up nuts, some are bedridden; some die in their 60s; some have no family; some are alone and lonely; some get no respect, no love, no comfort; some live in poverty, some end up in homes sharing a room with someone with dementia; some sit all day in a wheelchair in front of a TV; not everyone is loved and cherished and have their health in old age; some repeat the same sentence all day and have no idea who you are; some have hip replacements and two days later have gone gaga and peeing from their eighth floor hospital window; some are sick for ten years before they die; some outlive everyone they know; some are surrounded by caring family; some are robbed by their sons and daughters and never visited again; some end up depressed; some die while having a nap on the living room couch watching TV, and all old people will agree that these people are the lucky ones. Some old people are well looked after by family and friends; some have sons, daughters, and other care-givers who are loving and care for them; some live with their sons and daughters; some keep their health; some live into their nineties in fairly good health; some old people stay living in their own home surrounded by what is familiar to them, but all old people fear they will be have to face the most difficult time of their life alone, afraid of being isolated and lonely. Whatever the case, for many old people, being old is not a happy time. Blessed are the elderly who have loving family and friends who care for them. 

The rabbit is happy

 

A few days ago I sprained my ankle and couldn’t feed the rabbit. He went two days without carrots from me and then I decided I had to feed him. Because my ankle was swollen and black and blue I couldn’t put on shoes so I walked, or hobbled, to the back yard in socks and left the carrots and then came indoors right away; I looked out of the dining room window and the rabbit was there, he must have been watching me leave the carrots for him. My wife said he was “starving” and that he’s dependent on me. I hope not. Well, there you go, I didn’t want to let him down and we're both happy. I mean, the rabbit and I are happy.

Urban wildlife

 

My cousin Bob suggested leaving some carrots near the pile of branches at the back of the garden, maybe the rabbit would show up and we'd see if this was his home. And that is what happened, the rabbit appeared and now he sits in front of his home. The days are getting longer, over an hour longer since early January, and spring seems to be on its way. This has been the coldest and snowiest winter that I can remember, everyday it seems to be -12 C but "feels like" (with the wind chill) -22 C. We'll all be glad when this winter is over. We wait and wait and then we have a single mild day and think we've turned the corner but we haven't, it's -9 C right now (on February 21st) and we had more snow last night. Oh well, I am enjoying seeing the rabbit and leaving him a few pieces of carrot everyday. It's a small reprieve from the relentless and unpleasant winter we're having. But the rabbit is thriving, it's like the country out there even though we live in the city, less than twenty minutes from the downtown; there is a considerable amount of green space in parts of the city, not just parks but people's backyards. When I was growing up here you'd never see any urban wildlife, now we share our environment with rabbits, racoons, skunks, groundhogs, the ubiquitous squirrels, many different types of birds but notably cardinals who I hear singing every morning, and chickadees. There are fewer insects, we are destroying monarch butterflies and other insects. Most of what used to be nature, abandoned farmers' fields, they have all been built on and so we're all in this together, urban wildlife has had to move into the urban sprawl that is city if they want to survive. As Joni Mitchell sang, “We’ve paved paradise and put up a parking lot.” That is exactly what we have done. Above are some photographs and a 13 second video of the rabbit. 

Against Change/2

 

Philips Square seen from The Bay on 17 October 2009

    

One of the most existentially bleak things I've seen are television commercials promoting online gambling. These commercials extol the great fun to be had by solitary gambling on one's IPhone. In the commercials the actors portraying happy gamblers are all laughing and having a great time by themselves; even when shown in a room full of people, each person is alone, isolated, gambling on their IPhones; whatever the gimmick is to get them to gamble it's working--advertising works--as soon as the gambling begins these people are transformed, suddenly they are all laughing and happy. This scenario is what the gambling companies want you to believe, this is the lie they are promoting. These gambling companies would promote solitary drinking if they could get away with it, maybe that’s the next big thing.

    There are moral values for a reason; life is good when there are moral values, life has a structure by which people can live. We can see the result of our Western society's abandonment of morality; the result of society’s liberalization of the last fifty years has made society, and our individual lives, worse; it's become a free-for-all of arguing and "do what you want as long as it doesn't hurt someone else" attitude. We have fewer relationships, our families are scattered, we are isolated and alienated from other people, mental illness is rampant, sexuality is confused, and our children have been sacrificed for liberal reforms. Liberalization proceeds to a dystopian world of amorality and the inevitable loss of free speech. The children are not doing well in this new world that has abandoned morality. Liberalization, open mindedness, was ostensibly intended to make society more equitable, to remove injustices, to improve society, and to decriminalize non-victim crimes, but it didn't work out that way.

    What did abandoning moral values achieve? In the past we never had homeless people sleeping in the streets, we never had widespread drug use, and the same applies to access to pornography, gambling, prostitution, and so on. Go back fifty years. People had moral values, rules to live by, that supported society and emphasized people living a moral life; they were the underpinnings of a good, decent society. Today everyone has an opinion, there is a cacophony of disagreeing voices; people are arguing, opinions matter but facts don't matter, it's all subjective and up to personal opinion. It's better to say nothing or the progressives will attack you, and there is no going back. We laugh at morality, we barely remember that people once had moral values, and we smirk when morality is mentioned—grin and smirk, grin and smirk—. And if you express anything in public that is  critical of the new morality, the thought police will fine you, disagreeing is a hate crime; it's a crime to disagree with the currently fashionable opinions of others. When our moral values were denied, abolished by government to buy our vote, then almost immediately society began to collapse. 

    Today, good people are silenced by fear of being attacked, and society is increasingly looking like some dystopian facsimile of what we once had. We're told good and bad don’t exist, it’s all relative. The new morality does not include free speech; it is a morality of censorship. No one wants to return to oppressive values, to misogyny, to prejudice or racism, but what we have now is not working. What we change is at a cost; no one has gained anything by discarding the moral foundations of society in favour of the possibility of a better society, it didn't work; gambling is one of the most addictive activities and I suspect the IPhone makes it even more addictive, like doom scrolling, YouTube, Facebook, X, Instagram, Tik Tok, Pornhub, and the rest of "social" media hell.

Edited: 04, 05 March 2026

St. Augustine Catholic Church, 01 March 2012

One day I drove by the old St. Augustine Catholic Church; it was the church of my Auntie Mabel and the church of my grandmother‘s funeral in April 1965. A few years after St. Augustine’s closed the building was reopened as River's Edge Church, a nondenominational Protestant church that is, I hear, highly successful. The congregation of the former St. Augustine Catholic Church now worship at "the church of Notre-Dame-de-Grace, home to an active French-speaking community" on NDG Avenue. Photos taken on 01 March 2012, my mother’s 96th birthday.