Time Flies

I should be packing to return to New York, but fog is drifting by the windows, so I am reading the September issue of a Canadian literary magazine that a friend down the road brought over, because it has two stories with tangential Latin connections. I also found in its pages an advertisement for an ebook containing twenty-three years' worth of the Governor General's Performing Arts Awards. As you can see on the website, these awards have a crest of two lions rampant around a torch with a Latin motto encircling: ARTES NOS TENENT ET INSPIRANT (The arts hold and inspire us). Here is an explanation of the crest.

One of the two stories of Latin interest was a look into flying around Canada with a fragile copy of Magna Carta, reminding us again that 2015 is the eight-hundredth anniversary of the signing of the Great Charter at Runnymede. Most fascinating was the necessity of proper humidity around the document; the iron-based ink could in fact disappear under the wrong conditions. The other story was about decoding Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, especially the identity in nineteenth-century England of the Cheshire Cat, wordplay abounding. A disappearing cat, disappearing ink, a disappearing landscape--disappearing summer!