An Outlandish Journey

The closest I ever got to Margaret Atwood (apart from one reading that she gave in French in around 2010) was in 1992. I had just submitted my Gazette review of her poetry book Good Bones, the day before, and I was standing in line at the post office with a novel manuscript that I had packaged and was mailing off to an agent in NY. Ahead of me in line was a tall young woman with long curly black hair. She half turned and glanced at my package, probably seeing my name in the upper left corner. Then she swiveled around and from three feet away stared straight into my face. She had luminous green eyes, and looked like a younger version of Margaret Atwood. At the same time, she held up the envelope she had come to buy stamps for, so I could clearly read the handwritten names: Mr and Mrs C Atwood in Don Mills, Ontario, and the sender "J Atwood". It was the way she casually and pointedly displayed it beside her ear with a little smirk, that put me off. Normally I would have s...

[British psychiatrist William] Sargant goes over the London Blitz in his book ‘The Battle for the Mind.’ During this period, in order to cope and stay “sane”, the British people rapidly became accustomed to the idea that their neighbours could be and were buried alive in bombed houses around them. The thought was “If I can’t do anything about it what use is it that I trouble myself over it?” The best “coping” was thus found to be those who accepted the new “environment” and just focused on “surviving”, and did not try to resist it. Sargant remarks that it is this “adaptability” to a changing environment which is part of the “survival” instinct and is very strong in the “healthy” and “normal” individual who can learn to cope and thus continues to be “functional” despite an increasingly unstable environment. It was thus our deeply programmed “survival instinct” that was found to be the key to the suggestibility of our minds. That the best “survivors” made for the best “brain-washing...