The Fascination of Everyday Things: Margert Visser's The Way We Are

     Margaret Visser. The Way We Are (1994). A wonderful potato chip book, but more nourishing. Margaret Visser wrote a column for Saturday Night, Canada’s defunct general interest and arts magazine. Her editor, John Fraser, persuaded her to collect them into a book. Here it is, and if you can find a copy, buy or borrow it. You won’t be disappointed.
     Visser has a knack for giving you both the essence of some topic and some off-the-wall riff on it. These essays often prompt further reflection. My favourite: she ends In Flagrante Delicto (an essay about blushing) thus:
     We blush above all when we think that other people think that we are different from what we want them to think we are.
     Which reminds me of my tentative definition of “honour” as our mutual acceptance of the public images we’ve created of ourselves as being better than we know ourselves to be. “Dishonour” is the revelation that we are not what we pretend to be. Hence the widespread misconception that some bad behaviour reveals “what a person really is”. What a person really is all the behaviours they are capable of. Most of us never discover all that we are capable of, but few, I think, understand how lucky they are. ****