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George Grant, 1918–1988.
T.F. Rigelhof is a fiction and nonfiction writer living in Montreal. He has published a collection of short stories, two novels, and a memoir. His book of essays, This is Our Writing, was published in the Fall of 2000 by Porcupine’s Quill. His memoir, A Blue Boy in a Black Dress, was short listed for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Nonfiction and won a QSpell-Royal Bank Literary Prize in 1996.
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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.
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