Enlightened Librarian: The smell of blanks

The smell of blanks · Nov 11, 11:38 PM

It’s a comforting ritual: for years I’ve watched the CBC’s coverage of the national Remembrance Day ceremony, falling under the spell of the gliding camerawork, the montage of gnarled faces and the dulcet commentary of Peter Mansbridge. This year, I joined a few thousand others today at the national requiem, relinquishing a birds-eye view for the sense of being in a crowd. We massed behind barriers, forming the collective mildness that is a mob of Canadians who either have or haven’t dressed for the weather. Yet here was a vivid moment of national self-consciousness, in a country where even the smallest gesture of national pride can look like patriotic blather. In a city coolly accustomed to motorcades and ambassadorial handshakes, there was an easy, barely sheepish, removal of hats and toques, and most of those around me quietly sang the national anthem. But that wasn’t the moment I’m thinking of. Then there was a vague half hour peering between the heads in front, when I was jumpy from the 21-gun salute, watching the gunsmoke drift past the bronze soldiers of the memorial as though some weird dream-memory of the Somme. But that wasn’t it either. For me, it was the simple act of standing with a group of strangers (all the usual coughing, quiet words, scattered tears) that made me realize this is what a citizenry feels like. Standing with people you don’t know and being part of the same audience, the same body, more or less, of shared experience: this is what you fight—and die—for when you wage a war.

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