The Endgame

An encore presentation - The tyranny of distance

(Note: I’m travelling, and so for the next couple of weeks will repost each Sunday one of my favourite old Endgames. This week, Endgame #8 - The tyranny of distance.)

Toronto, January 25, 2023

The tyranny of distance

Last week I took a few days off and went to Barbados with my middle-aged daughter. While she baked in the sun, sipping on piña coladas, I sat in the shade of a beach sheoak, wearing a long-sleeved shirt and jeans, reading Brigitta Olubas’s excellent new biography, Shirley Hazzard: A Writing Life. (“Get a life, Dad!” said my daughter, affectionately, when she saw how I was dressed and what I was doing.) Hazzard wrote two of the finest novels of recent times, The Transit of Venus and The Great Fire. Her husband, Francis Steegmuller (no mean writer himself), said of The Great Fire, enigmatically, “No one should have to read it for the first time.”

In her biography, Olubas quotes extensively from Hazzard’s voluminous diaries. Many entries stick in the mind. I ruminated particularly on one of them: “They didn’t feel the tyranny of distance—they wondered why anybody else should be alive.”

Hazzard (1931–2016) was an Australian. The tyranny of distance for her was to be living somewhere far from places that she thought really mattered, particularly the great cities of the world. That’s why, as soon as she could, she scarpered and ended up spending most of her life in New York, Naples and Capri, with time out for visits to Paris, Rome, London, etc., etc. As someone brought up mostly on the Canadian prairie, I get it.

But who was it that Hazzard thought “didn’t feel the tyranny of distance” and “wondered why anybody else should be alive”? It was the Chinese, viewed by Hazzard from Hong Kong where she lived with her family in the late 1940s. Her pithy analysis of 75 years ago seems prescient. Has anything changed in the Chinese attitude towards the world since Hazzard was in Hong Kong?

There are many kinds of distance, each with its own tyranny. Hazzard feared cultural distance, to be far from the cultural centres of the world, to be excluded from desirable literary salons, to be uninvited to dinner parties given by those who mattered, to be unknown to bold-face names, to be on the cultural outside looking in. (Yes, there’s snobbism in all of this.)

Then there’s the tyranny of physical distance. At its most elemental, it’s hard to be away from those you love. Physical distance can contribute to other, less brutal, distances—the cultural distance that so perturbed Hazzard, for example. What if English-language culture resided in London and New York in the 1950s, and you lived a world away in Australia (or Manitoba)? People say that physical distance doesn’t mean much anymore, with easy air travel and advanced communications, but that’s to overstate the case. In the imagination, miles to be travelled on a dusty metaphorical road still matter.

Other tyrannies of distance include age (can one generation ever understand another?) and money (will the rich ever care about the poor?) But the biggest tyranny of them all is the tyranny of emotional distance, the gap between us and our fellow human beings, the gap that we spend our lives trying to bridge, often desperately.

At the end of our vacation, my daughter and I boarded an Air Canada Dreamliner at Barbados Grantley Adams Airport, bound for Toronto’s Pearson Airport, ready to traverse yet another distance, from the Caribbean to The North. We’d had a good time together.

Daughter in Barbados