LITMIR.BIZ

      Objective. Professor Grants objective on this sunny, safe morning in May 1967 is to get to the office on time to meet with the student who has made an appointment. Ever since that day when he wasn’t where the bomb was, he has tried to always be where he’s supposed to be at the time he’s supposed to be there.

      The things that George had seen in the war, the death and destruction of innocent people, taught him just what horrible things human beings will do to one another when one nation, no matter how good the majority of its citizens might normally be, decides that its military power must be the mightiest in the world and its ways must be followed by all its neighbours. But he had learned something else in those dark moments – he’d also learned the value of resistance, of standing against the opinion of the majority and insisting on telling the truth. These were lessons that had turned him away from becoming a lawyer and a politician and a pessimist. He has lived his adult life with the awareness of what madness war is and what atomic weapons can do.

      In 1967, he doesn’t know if we’re going to destroy ourselves in a nuclear war or slowly destroy the planet through pollution. But he can imagine something worse than either – a prosperous and peaceful society in which human beings have so lost their humanity that they worship the machines they have created and allow them to rule all of life. Such a society would be so disgusting that it should be destroyed. Addressing other thinking Canadians at the Lake Couchiching Conference in 1955, he’d said, “However, what is certain, beyond doubt, is that whether we live at the end of the world or at the dawn of a golden age or neither, it still counts absolutely to each one of us that in and through the beauty and the anguish, the good and evil of the world, we come in freedom upon the joy unspeakable.”

      George Grant is physically massive – more than six feet, over two hundred and twenty pounds. He has thick grey-blond hair, penetrating blue eyes, rosy cheeks, a mischievous, boyish face. At McMaster, his office is located in University Hall, one of the original buildings of an old Baptist college that had been built to look as if it had always been there. University Hall is a stone building in the Gothic style. Vines grow on its walls and creep across the leaded glass panes of its windows. McMaster is undergoing a building boom, but Professor Grant’s office looks away from it and on to the older part of the campus – trees, lawns, and other stone buildings in the Gothic style. He sits in a large, overstuffed chair. A young man sits, stiff and nervous, on a wooden chair that’s almost too close. He’s the same age George was when he witnessed the bombing of London first hand, but he knows nothing of Professor Grant’s wartime experiences and very little about the rest of his life. What he does know, the thing that has brought him from elsewhere in Canada and led him to apply to McMaster to do a Master of Arts in the religion department, is that he wants to study with George Grant. He has just said this excitedly.

      “Why would you want to do that?” Professor Grant asks.

      Years later, when he’d become a teacher, he’ll tell his own students that he’d studied with George Grant because Grant was a man of learning – a man who lived what he knew – and that such teachers are much rarer and more difficult to understand than people who want to know about things just so that they can gain power over them and control them. But, at that moment, he doesn’t know quite what to say. He’s disconcerted by the question. He’s disconcerted by his closeness to a man whose books he’s read. The young man has not met many authors. And he’s a little disconcerted by the way George Grant smokes cigarettes. The cigarette never seems to leave his mouth. It just sort of sticks to his lower lip as he talks and scatters ashes on his clothes. When he’s silent, the ash grows longer and longer and then falls and sometimes it’s caught in the hand and sometimes it isn’t. And a fresh cigarette is lit from the butt of the one just smoked. The young man has known other chain smokers, knows that many men who went through the Second World War became deeply addicted to cigarettes because smoking deadened their noses to the stench of dead bodies. The young man is also a heavy smoker and doesn’t yet know – and most people in 1967 don’t know – how dangerous smoking is to health. But the young man has never known anyone so oblivious to the mess they’re making of their own clothes because they’re speaking and listening so carefully and are so lost in conversation. Not knowing what to say in answer to the question, the young man blurts out, “Because I don’t know what you know.”

      “What do you think that is?” Professor Grant asks.

      “If I knew, then I’d know and I don’t but I know it has something to do with finding peace within yourself when the world is at war.”

      The meeting lasted another hour and a half, much longer than the young man had ever spent in conversation with any of his other teachers in the five years he’d spent at two other universities. At the end, the young man knew some of what he hadn’t known and how much more he needed to learn.