The Cunning Man

                                                                          

Davies is one of my favorite authors, to whom I return again and again, always finding something new to think about, always enjoying his keen perceptions about humanity.

This is the second book in his (unfinished)Toronto Trilogy, but it reads like a standalone. The narrator is a physician with an uncanny gift for diagnosis and an unusual methodology. Humor, high jinks, a possible saint, a possible murder in a very high Anglican church and all the convoluted relationships among a certain set of Toronto's intellectual/artistic crowd are grist for Davies' mill--which grinds exceeding small, indeed.

An utterly delightful re-re-read!

NOTE: Regarding the caduceus --the physician's symbol of two serpents twined around a staff--Davies (through his characters) has this to say: 

". . . the warring serpents of Hermes--Knowledge and Wisdom, balanced in an eternal tension."

"Knowledge being science and all the accumulated lore you have pumped into you at medical school; science which keeps changing and shifting all through your lifetime, like a snake shedding its old skin--"

"And Wisdom, with which you have to apply and temper the whole business, and fit it to the patient who sits before you, so that it too has a serpentine sinuosity and of course the wisdom which snakes are--quite mistakenly--supposed to possess."

I've been fortunate to have known a few medical providers who seemed to try for that balance.

Another Snippet

 

Another quote from Robertson Davies that caught my attention:

“One of my favorite cultural fossils,” said he, “is the

 garden gnome. You have observed them? Very cute objects, very cute indeed. But do people want them simply, for cuteness? I don’t believe it. The gnomes provide some of that sugar in the drink of belief that Western religion no longer offers, and which the watered-down humanitarianism that passes with so many people for religion offers even less. The gnomes speak of a longing, unrecognized but all the stronger for its invisibility, for the garden-god, the image of the earth-spirit, the kobold, the kabir, the guardian of the household. Dreadful as they are, they have a truth you won’t find in the bird-bath or the sun-dial.”

                                                    

We don't have garden gnomes, but my mother-in-law (not a Catholic nor even particularly religious) had a little statue of St. Fiacre (or St. Focaro, as she called him.) And numerous folks have statues of St, Francis in their gardens. A similar impulse?

A Snippet

 

“Oh, this overbred passion for quiet! Totally unnatural. We are usually begotten with a certain amount of noise. and For our first nine months we are carried in the womb in a positive hubbub—the loud tom-tom of the heart, the croaking and gurgling of the guts, which must sound like the noise of the rigging on a sailing ship, and the mother’s loud laughter—can you imagine what that must be like to Little Nemo, lurching and heaving in his watery bottle while the diaphragm hops up and down? Why are children noisy? Because, literally, they’re bred to it. People find fault with their kids when they say they can do their homework better while the radio is playing, but the kids are simply trying to recover the primal racket in which they learned to be everything from a blob, to a fish, to a human creature. Silence is entirely a sophisticated, acquired taste. Silence is anti-human.”

Once again I'm re-reading THE REBEL ANGELS by Robertson Davies. It's set in a Canadian University and I find the dialogue between academics delightful.