Jane Macdougall: Do we make ourselves late or does lateness happen?

Article content

“Lateness happened to me.”

That, I’m told, is the idiomatic expression used by the Japanese when arriving at an appointment later than anticipated. It’s kind of perfect, isn’t it? I mean, the oddest things can derail a timely arrival.

Article content

Ducklings on the causeway. Alternating single lane traffic on the bridge. Dentist discovers not one, but two, cavities. Oftentimes, the matter is entirely out of your control. Commuting is always a jump ball. The domino effect of one glitch can ripple through vast communities. Think for one moment about bridges or tunnels. Bottlenecks! Lateness isn’t always your fault. And really, except for rocket launches, does five minutes one way or the other really affect much?

Article content

In Japan, if your train is even slightly late, the train company issues a chien shōei sho — a certificate of lateness that you can present to your employer. The same goes for Germany. If a passenger train arrives at its station later than scheduled, you can request a bescheinigun über Zugverspätung, which translates to a certificate about train delay. The idea behind all of this is that, well, the idea is that “lateness happened to you.”

We place a premium on punctuality but it wasn’t so long ago that time was a more fluid construct. In fact, Canada — immense, and tri-coastal — didn’t even have time zones until 1885. It was only when we had a continent-spanning railway that we had a pressing need to synchronize clocks to geography. And we only got them because of the Canadian Pacific Railway and because someone ended up missing a train and spent a cold night in a train station.

Due to timetable confusion, Sir Sandford Fleming, Canada’s foremost railway construction engineer and surveyor, missed his train. It was on that long, cold night in an empty train station that he began to appreciate that timetables needed to be systematized. He began advocating 24 global time zones and for the standardization of clocks based on Greenwich Mean Time.

Article content

Canada can’t lay claim to having invented standardized time but it was a Canadian’s efforts that resulted in the adoption of international standard time.

The United States got time zones in late 1883, several months before Canada. The concept of time zones had been championed by Charles Dowd, a school principal, 11 years earlier. The idea was considered a New World revolution and there was reluctance to adopt the idea. The Old World — Europe — didn’t have the same need for time zones. Countries like Canada and the United States, however, cover massive distance from east to west, in fact, ranging from 52* W to 141* W. Solar time, it should be noted, differs by one minute per every 18 kilometres. Back in the mid-1800s, the chance of covering more than 18k in a day was scant. The idea of ‘noon, a week from now’ was a very flexible construct, indeed.

Today, however, we live by something called International Atomic Time. Across the globe, hundreds of atomic oscillators tick and tock away, measuring ‘tempus fugit’. These measurements are correlated to the rotation of the earth, something called UTC — Co-ordinated Universal Time. The International Telecommunications Union, an agency of the United Nations, runs this operation and dispenses the data to countries who then adjust the figures based on their geo-position on the globe.

Article content

Article content

Personally, I cleave to the club of approximates. In my books, five minutes late isn’t late at all. This, in my humble opinion, is the difference between clocks, maybe not atomic clocks, but my microwave clock versus my bedroom clock. Stringent punctuality isn’t the hallmark of godliness. My least favourite people are the people who show up for dinner at seven at 6:59 p.m.

This week’s question for readers:
WHERE DO YOU STAND ON THE SUBJECT OF PUNCTUALITY?

Send your answers by email text, not an attachment, in 100 words or less, along with your full name to Jane at thebooklessclub@gmail.com. We will print some next week in this space.

Last week’s question for readers: WHAT ARE YOUR FAVOURITE GALLERY OR MUSEUM MEMORIES?
I can never get enough of Agnolo Bronzino’s, An Allegory of Venus and Cupid. In 1994, I went to the National Gallery to view the painting and discovered on arrival that the Bronzino room was under reconstruction for a special Bronzino exhibit. I was granted a special admission after much pleading and big tall tales. I was allowed a ten minute visit under escort. And there it was in all its beauty and glory … on the floor, leaning against a wall surrounded with lumber, drills and nails. I was looking down at it. How often does one get to view a priceless painting (casually placed on the floor) from this perspective?! I bought a poster. The colours have faded but it is still hanging in my dining room and everyday, it reminds me of this very special moment in the National Gallery.

Article content

— Soon Loo

As a gap year university student in 1973 I hitchhiked to Paris and spent a day at the Jeu de Paume which then housed the impressionist collection. It was an old building formerly a tennis pavilion but the walls were chock-a-block, floor-to-ceiling vivid impressionist art crowded into tiny rooms. It wasn’t one particular painter or sculptor but just the overwhelming majesty of these brilliant styles and palettes. I came out of there dazed. A followup visit to the same collection at the Musée D’Orsay years later just did not have that same capacity to overwhelm.

— Bill Markvoort

When our daughter was around 11 years old, my husband and I took her and her best friend on a trip to Paris and the UK. While in Paris, we visited the Musée d’Art Moderne. I have photos of the girls standing and gazing at one of the large pieces hanging in the museum. I also have a photo of my husband standing and gazing at a schematic drawing of the space hanging on a wall near an emergency exit. Art truly is subjective.

— Chris Walton

Some of my most memorable museum experiences include viewing Van Gogh sketches of boats and perspectives at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, and experiencing an immersive exhibit called, “So, You Want a Revolution” about ’60s music in London at the Royal Albert Museum.

Article content

— Don Collins

I was 17 when I first visited the Louvre and the memory that impacted me the most was Jacques-Louis David’s “The Coronation of Napoleon”. Three reasons: 1) Its sheer size of 20 x 32 feet — I’d never see a canvas so large. 2) The subject and David’s incredible attention to detail, but most importantly, 3) When I discovered (about an hour later in another room) that the Louvre was also home to the pearl drop earrings worn by Josephine in the picture! This just made the painting and event all the more real for me seeing physical objects that had been worn almost 200 years ago by a famous historical figure. And what woman doesn’t enjoy looking at jewelry?

— Pamela Francis

My favourite museums are usually private collections — the Frick in New York, the Wallace Collection in London, the Getty in LA, the Isabella Stuart Gardner in Boston … with one person’s (or family’s) personal touch that is a common thread through the works. Public collections can, of course, be fabulous, but are often collected over decades or centuries and do not hold the same personality for me.

Kind of like the Nuytten Collection — there is a quality there that resonates.

Article content

— Jeanette Johnston

In 1985 my daughter, 9, and my son, 8, and I were travelling in Paris and the kids wanted to see the Louvre. In the entrance foyer are nude statues. My kids began to titter and giggle. I told them that there are lots of nudes here and if they are going to be silly about the human body, we were going to leave. They promised to behave and, from then on, they walked around with such serious, studious looks examining the nudes, that one would believe they were PhD art students! I could hardly contain my laughter.

— Gail Maltby

Once, while on a visit to London during a break from teaching in Hong Kong, I called the Imperial War Museum to see if I could look at some of the paintings of Edward Ardizzone, a children book illustrator and war artist that I particularly admired. I was promptly invited to Special Collections and, expecting perhaps two or three original pieces to look at, was ushered into a private space, handed a pair of cotton gloves and allowed as much time as I liked with a stack of his watercolours almost as tall as me. I enjoyed a solitary hour marvelling at the beauty of Ardizzone’s paintings and the faith in human nature shown by the museum allowing me to be alone with the works.

Article content

— Michael Mayer

I didn’t really appreciate what great art was until we went to the Musée d’orsay In Paris. I was literally transfixed by the Van Gogh paintings. They seemed alive and drew me in. They induced unformed emotions that were hard to pin down and flitted from state to state. I must have spent the best part of an hour in front of his paintings. The hour seemed like ten minutes and I lost all sense of time. I’ve never had that experience with any other paintings, great as they may be. This transcendental experience made me realize what truly great art is and why.

— Ralph Jones

I was 18 and with my future wife we visited the old Vancouver Art Gallery on Georgia Street. In a performance room in the back of the gallery there was a group of 6 drummers, each with a single conga drum. They wouldn’t play until the 20 or so of us took off our shoes! Once that happened, they began playing. I was transfixed by the spirit and power of the rhythms they were playing. We all danced. The impact of that experience spawned a love of drums in me. I have been playing them now for 56 years.

— Roger Bryant

In 1975, age 24, the obligatory back-packing-through-Europe trip got me to the Louvre’s Musée Orangerie and Monet’s Water Lilies series. I sat on the settee in the centre of the oval room, entranced for what seemed half an hour, generally completely alone with them, eventually realizing the true three dimensionality of the images. I was transfixed and overwhelmed. When I left I discovered it had actually been more than two hours I’d sat there. This was and remains even more impactful than the 20 minutes I had the Mona Lisa [then in a side room with the other da Vinci’s] to myself.

Article content

— Michael Cook

While in Montreal for the jazz festival a number of years ago we stopped in to the MMFA. As I am always troubled by encounters with the homeless, the haunting gaze in Allison Schulik’s, Long Haired Hobo really connected with me. This painting flashes into my mind with every homeless encounter which unfortunately is all too frequent in Vancouver.

— Derek Pilecki

My best memories of museums come from a trip across Canada that I took about five years ago. I had returned home to Canada after living in the states for the last 25 years and realized I didn’t really know my home country as well as I would like. So, I took a six-week train trip across the county, stopping at each major city and several small towns along the way. The goal was museums in the day and jazz clubs at night. I discovered so many wonderful museums. But the best were the little local history museums. I still inquire if I can stop by one if I am road tripping through small towns as they are the best to understand the area you are travelling through.

— Deni Loubert

My favourite museum memory is likely not shared with many. I was about 30 years old, in London, and went to the National Gallery for the first time. “The Execution of Lady Jane Grey” absolutely stunned me. It tells the story of her beheading for treason in the 1500s after only nine days as Queen. Most believe her to have been completely innocent: a pawn, a mere child. I think I spent an hour in total in front of this painting: the sombre mood, gentleness of Lady Jane Grey’s executioners, her tender age of 16 or 17 and the glow of her gown.

Article content

I’ve never forgotten her.

— Leslie Raffin

When I was a child, we lived in an eastern suburb of Toronto, quite a long way from downtown. But I absolutely adored the Royal Ontario Museum, at Bloor and University, and frequently badgered my mother to take me to visit the mummies and the dinosaurs — other stuff too, but those were my favourites. Oddly, my mother could contain her admiration for mummies and dinosaurs. So, from the time I was eight years-old, I took bus and streetcar, alone, every Sunday afternoon, to visit the ROM. Today, my parents might have been investigated for child abuse! I, however, loved it.

— Patricia Dewhirst

I visited the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg during perestroika and was amazed at everything about it. Spread across 120 different rooms, the vastness and amount of gold everywhere you looked, over three million exhibits, priceless art and Oriental treasures, and queues of locals quietly waiting while we westerners were allowed to file in while they waited — an experience I didn’t like, but once inside couldn’t get enough of, room after room of priceless treasures. I will never forget it.

Article content

— Jackie Hobson

Rome, Florence, Milan: Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam and The Book of Genesis ceiling in the Sistine Chapel, his sculpture of David; Botticelli’s Venus Rising; da Vinci’s The Last Supper; the exquisite mosaics in Ravenna. London: Millais’s Ophelia; Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus; the appropriated Parthenon frieze; the Rosetta Stone. Coventry’s bombed Cathedral and later replacement. Madrid: Picasso’s Guernica; Velazquez’s The Ladies in Waiting; Bosch’s triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights. The Holy Grail in the Valencia Cathedral. Amsterdam: Rembrandt’s The Night Watch. Paris: Nike of Samothrace; da Vinci’s Mona Lisa; Manet’s Olympia. Washington DC’s Natural History Museum and the Venus of Willendorf statuette and evolution of man exhibit. The VAG’s amazing Emily Carr paintings. The amazing Sargent showing at the Seattle Art Gallery years ago. The impressive architecture and purpose of the National Museum of Human Rights in Winnipeg. One day in New York: van Gogh’s Starry Night. My most unconventional memory is mistakenly utilizing a stall in the men’s washroom at MOMA. Once I realized, I nervously waited to exit when the coast was clear. That never happened. A solo chap caught me skulking out and chastised me on what would happen if that had been him in the reverse. My supreme humiliation for the love of art.

Article content

— Sandra Gall

It was a golden October day. Our Ontario hosts had dropped us in the small village of Kleinburg to visit the McMichael Art Museum to explore the works of the Group of Seven and their contemporaries. Little did we guess the paintings would be housed within a building constructed of fieldstone and hand-hewn logs and located within 100 acres of wild woodland. Such unlikely surroundings for a gallery but uniquely appropriate for these famous Canadian painters who worshipped their rugged surroundings. At one point we stepped from a room where we had been admiring J.E.H. MacDonald’s “Altima Woodland” and found ourselves in the hallway admiring a very similar scene, this one captured in the floor to ceiling window at the end of the hall. Never have I felt so completely immersed in art and so proud to be Canadian.

— June Macdonald

Jane Macdougall is a freelance writer and former National Post columnist who lives in Vancouver. She will be writing on The Bookless Club every Saturday online and in The Vancouver Sun. For more of what Jane’s up to, check out her website, janemacdougall.com

Bookmark our website and support our journalism: Don’t miss the news you need to know — add VancouverSun.com and TheProvince.com to your bookmarks and sign up for our newsletters here.

You can also support our journalism by becoming a digital subscriber: For just $14 a month, you can get unlimited access to The Vancouver Sun, The Province, National Post and 13 other Canadian news sites. Support us by subscribing today: The Vancouver Sun | The Province.

Article content