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Hamilton Arts & Letters
I dreamed that because Northrop Frye and I were friends—much closer friends than we had been in real life—I had somehow been made privy to his final hours.
Even though the great critic had been associated all his life with Victoria College in the University of Toronto, he had sickened, and was now dying within a labyrinth of venerable old buildings that more resembled those of University College than those of his own Vic. I remember there were a number of high windows, many of them, one after another, through which I had to clamber—and as rapidly as possible, for I was somehow late for his obsequies.
As the hour of Professor Frye’s death approached, I noted with increasing alarm that, as the door opened to the inner office where, presumably, some sort of rich, literary last rite was being administered, a procession of what were to my mind strangely inappropriate figures began solemnly to emerge, at an irritatingly predicable rhythm, from the room: unicyclists, jugglers, a ballerina (who winked and simpered at me as she flitted by), traveling salesmen with heavy black valises, straggly-haired scholars in tweed suits with elbow patches and pipes (who nodded condescendingly at me like those plastic birds that dip their beaks over and over again into a glass of water), and a couple of perky cheerleaders with megaphones.
[Distillate © HA&L + Gary Michael Dault {from the Greek bios} -- the course of a life. Illustration by Gord Pullar.]
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