“Corporations come and go, leaving hardly any trace, while art endures.
Yet it is corporations and their voracious demands that regulate our lives nowadays, far more than theaters, bookstores and museums. Why is that? Why is it that people work so crazily hard these days, at the expense of family, health, and happiness? Have we not perhaps forgotten that work is a means to an end, that we work so that we might live, and not the other way round? We’ve become slaves to our work and have forgotten that it’s in moments of leisure and stillness, when we’re free from working with a hoe or at a keyboard, that we can contemplate life and become fully ourselves. We work, work, work, but what mark do we leave, what point do we make? People who are too beholden to work become like erasers: as they move forward, they leave in their wake no trace of themselves. And so that has been the point of my fruitless book-gifting to you: to raise my voice against Canada becoming a nation of erasers.”
