1942:

[135] Another S.C.R. [Senior Common Room] one: “they always assassinate the wrong man.”

1942:

[134] Met Kay Mabee at Feinsod’s: Children’s Aid on Isabella. Just through with taking five kids to court, packed in rumble seat, to charge parents with neglect & take custody. She noticed they seemed to be playing some sort of game, & she discovered it was seeing who could amass the biggest collection of fleas. Tonight Helen staying down & I strolled over to Yonge for dinner, found Murray’s jammed, drifted down to Bloor, picked up Roy [Kemp] & had dinner at Babloor. Full of his draft, of course. So I’m depressed, irritated, nostalgic & half-sick, & I suspect that tooth, which bothered me last year at exactly this time, is acting up again. The Forum sent up a ragtag staff too & that adds to the depression. Oh God, I’m bored with the war: I can’t even rise to a nobler expression.

Burwash Hall, Victoria College: Senior Common Room at left

1942:

[132] Add to S.C.R. [Senior Common Room] catchwords (Sept. 14): “I don’t see why unconventional people aren’t willing to take the consequences of being unconventional.”

[133] At that party of Marion Darte’s Eleanor [Godfrey], stewed, said she didn’t like divorced people: Ray [Godfrey] said: “Say you don’t like the system of divorce, not that you don’t like divorced people.” I was very impressed with that for several days but not anymore. To dislike divorce is a vague approximation: to dislike divorced people is concrete as far as it goes. I don’t trust approximate remarks. Thus you say: “throw out all the old men & put in young ones,” meaning “throw out incompetents & put in good men,” but as the former looks vaguely like a more practical suggestion you hope it will approximate the latter.

1942:

[131] Three lectures and busting with shit: went home early this afternoon. Then to Havelock’s for a debating society executive meeting, Eric has taken quite a shine to me evidently & he certainly does work hard at debates. They varied between political and local-scandal subjects, suggesting “should formal parties be suspended?” I said it would be more interesting to say “should formal dresses be suspended?” They came to no conclusions but are planning a group of inter-year debates.

1942:

[130] Well, today was the Retreat. I got through it somehow, dividing it into “The Search for Wisdom” (morning) and “The Search for the Word” (afternoon). I said everything is learned by the scientific method and absorbed in the personality as an art, a knack or flair. The former is knowledge, the latter wisdom & the goal of an “arts” course. Knowledge of itself is lumber or a machine: a liberal education implies the elimination of pedantry & vulgarity & the achievement of a fully integrated personality. Students come to college because they want to grow. Mental growth is a fact like physical growth. But the possessor of a liberal education is not his own end, nor do his class affiliations or social responsibilities exhaust his duties, for there are no douanes in culture. Hence wisdom is the entry into a universal order and a world of spiritual values. The discussion was good but the staff talked too much. I stressed “scientia,” knowledge, as against “love of wisdom,” philosophy, which defines defines the human attitude towards the knowledge. Love today is interest, the difference between the good & mediocre student of equal intelligence. In the afternoon I went on with “The Search for the Word”: wisdom reveals spiritual values but does not save more than a few Stoics of exceptional strength who have the very rare quality of heroic wisdom from an evil physical world. Besides, the personal is superior to the impersonal. Hence wisdom becomes less an abstract noun & more a concrete entity of mind, or person: a saviour, furthermore, a God also man. Hence wisdom which arrives at the Logos has expanded into revelation or vision. The kids couldn’t get that, of course, and fought whether you could know if God exists or not. However, I really think the Retreat was less hideously futile than usual.

1942: The new term gets under way.

[129] Chancellor Wallace in a sermon quoted George H. Palmer on the death of his wife: ‘Who can contemplate the fact of her death & not call the world irrational if out of deference to a few particles of disordered matter it excludes so fair a spirit?’ Remarks like that don’t usually impress me, but this one does.

1942:

[128] Full of shit again. Every once in a while I get shocked by the callousness and brutality of members of my class: I was thinking of that Sunday afternoon at Millars. Mildred [Oldfield Millar] was speaking of young David’s tendencies to run across the road, & I said ‘You can imagine the state of mind of mothers on Charles St., or places where kids have to play on the streets.’ One woman said ‘Oh, I don’t think those people care much.’ Cats would care, and hens would care, but the mothers of Charles St. don’t give a damn.

1942: 

[126] Morley [Callaghan] & Eleanor [Godfrey] dislike the English but don’t fully understand why: it’s because they’re Catholics, of course. The confusions of interests today are curious. Heywood Broun turned R.C. after he’d become convinced, wrongly of course, that it wasn’t inherently Fascist. He judged the church by a political standard assumed superior to it. Yet if he had realized this he’d have sold out to the reactionaries. Funny deadlock.

 [127] The theory of democracy about the will of the people being the source of government is, in that form, just will-worship like Calvin’s.