Assorted Reflections

My Father's Centenary, Christmas Blessings, and an Interview on AI, Smartphones, and other things

Bitume (Tredi), 3 Nivôse, CCXXXIV

I: Today, 23 December 2025, would have been the 100th birthday of my father, Robert Warren Hart. He passed away at the age of 87, after a prolonged decline. Throughout his early youth, his parents—conscious of how inconvenient it was for a child to have been born so near to Christmas Day—made an effort to see that some firm distinction was preserved between his birthday and his Christmas gifts. They also made the decorating of the tree a part of his birthday celebrations.

He belonged to the generation that fought the Second World War, and he was one of those whose special portion it was to be thrust into the worst of the fighting, more or less from the moment he reached France to the final days of battling street-to-street through German cities. He never spoke much of those days when I was growing up; it was only in later years, from the conversations that sprang up between him and some of his former comrades in arms when he at last began attending the occasional reunion, that I really learned how horrific had been the action he had seen, how many of his friends he saw die or suffer terrible wounds, and why he never had any appetite for telling war stories. There could scarcely have been a man less temperamentally suited to combat; he was brave, and loyal to his friends, but he detested killing, and he hated seeing other men die. He was, you see, a man of almost preternatural kindness.

He should have gone into music after the war. He had a bass-baritone voice of extraordinary power and beauty, and he had been an opera and operetta enthusiast from an early age. But, after the war, he did the responsible thing and pursued a professional life in business; so many returning GI’s wanted nothing more than to believe it was possible to live a normal life in the aftermath of what they had just gone through. And he did. Marriage, children, pets (he loved animals without reserve), a profession, and so forth; but his indifference to what he did for a living was so complete that he never spoke about work, and never even really explained to us what his career entailed.

He was marked by the war in ways I did not understand until I was old enough to do so. There were periods of melancholy and strange anxiety. But there was also, and much more frequently, a great deal of mirth.

I know too much about my father to be able to say much about him. I am too keenly conscious of how little any of us can convey in words of what we know about those we love. The one thing I will say—and that many others who knew my father have also said—is that he was simply the kindest man I ever knew.

II: I want to send out salutations at Christmas, to all of you who keep the feast, as well as those who do not. And belated blessings for Hanukkah, which ended yesterday. It has not been a good year for the world, as years or worlds go, and I am not overly sanguine about the year ahead. But, with sufficient charity and the occasional frantic prayer sent upward in the middle of the night, we might all get through it. God bless us, everyone.

III: I was recently interviewed by a journalist at the CBC in Montreal (though on Anglophone radio) for an audio article on which he was working. He has given me permission to share the full recording of our exchange. The audio is here:

And the video here:

You may notice that neither he nor I have made any attempt to show up in our choicest threads. As I said, the recording was for an audio article. The young man interviewing me, incidentally, is named Gabriel Ellison-Scowcroft. Our conversation began with a consideration of the changes the smartphone has made in our lives, personal and social, but soon expanded into any number of related topics, including philosophy of mind, information theory, the progressive dissolution of human experience in the solvent of virtual space, the ubiquity of the algorithm, and (of course) dogs and otters.