Friday, Jan. 14, 2005
5:30 p.m.

I am on the home stretch of two autobiographies. One is a posthumous publication of some of Timothy Findley’s journal entries, speeches, and articles. It’s called Journeyman - Travels of a Writer. There is a warm person here; he bares his heart but is never maudlin. An earlier volume of his memoirs is called Stone Orchard, and recalls his life on a farm in rural Ontario.

Findley also wrote Not Wanted on the Voyage, a fiction about the people and events on Noah’s Ark during the great flood, and Famous Last Words, another fiction that includes as characters Wallis Simpson and the Duke of Windsor. But his masterpiece is said to be The Wars, with which as a young man he made his mark on the literary world.

Timothy Findley died in 2002.

From Journeyman ~
London, December 26, 1953
Journal

I feel today an overwhelming sense of gratefulness for what Alec Guinness has done for me. While somehow it has been tangible in a way — plays and galleries and museums and meeting people and school, the major thing is intangible as anything can be. I am here. I have been living with a great man. I have taken part in his education and values, but above all I think he has awakened in me an awareness of what I am and what I am about and what the world is about and why there is a work of art and why we create and where I fit into the scheme of the world. And above all, he has taught me that I must live my own life and find within my own heart the sense and meaning of my life .... Now I have confidence in the fact that things can happen, even though I don’t have confidence in myself.

More and more is able to happen when I am willing to let it happen.

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