Oh well then. Nov. 16 is the anniversary of the publication of volume one of Marcel Proust’s alleged masterpiece À la recherche du temps perdu in 1913. Six more volumes followed over 14 years and, according to Wikipedia, “He is considered by many to be one of the greatest authors of all time.” Not by me.

Now I should certainly mention here that I have never read Proust. It is, to quote Danny Bhoy, kind of important to the story. I have never had any desire to read Proust and reading a synopsis of Proust reinforces the feeling that it would be temps perdu to do so.

Proust himself never really seems to have lived. He was sickly, withdrawn and melancholy, and as far as I can see so is his massive oeuvre. What for? As novelist George Moore, who I also haven’t read and don’t plan to, once commented about Proust, “If a man chooses to dig up a field with a pair of knitting needles, is there any reason I should watch him doing it?”

No. And there is good reason not to.

Life is a tremendous gift. It is denied to many, who die young and do not get a fair shot at the adventure. But it is refused by many, not because they kill themselves but because they let it pass them by.

I know, I know. Life is hard for some people. They are born in grinding poverty; have cruel parents; suffer handicaps. But if you look around you at the people who have seized life, they were not all born with the advantages that can make life easy or, paradoxically, hard. I just saw a feature on the news about a guy with severely stunted arms and legs who plays competitive football.

So what’s Proust’s excuse for mooning around and then writing an endless, elegant book about same? And why, even if he was a talented stylist, would people go gaga about it? (André Gide, who initially advised a publisher against the novel, later called it “one of the most stinging and remorseful regrets of my life”.) Are they looking for an excuse not to embrace life’s adventure?

Look. If you’re alive, you’re enjoying a privilege denied a great many people. If you’re alive and past 21, you’re enjoying a privilege denied many of Canada’s soldiers. So grab it. Live it. Don’t waste time reading Proust.

I certainly don’t plan to. In fact, on Nov. 16 I think I’ll read a book that’s actually entertaining and instructive just to be contrary. It’s not as though there’s any shortage of those.

Well, here’s another notable historical bust. On Nov. 15, back in 1920, the first League of Nations session opened in Geneva.

It’s tied to another notable historical bust, the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1919 U.S. President Woodrow Wilson got it for helping found the League, without adequate attention being paid to the way his sanctimonious arrogance helped keep his own country from joining. But at least the Nobel Peace Prize does little harm. Unlike the League.

It might seem that the League of Nations was harmless. I don’ t just mean in the pejorative prison sense but the half-positive normal sense that it wasn’t actively bad even if it failed to achieve its lofty goals. But I disagree.

The League was actively harmful. Not because it took it upon itself to invade Czechoslovakia or Ethiopia or anything of that sort. But because it fostered the illusion that “the international community” was on the job, doing something about aggression, fostering the brotherhood of man (I suppose I should say the siblinghood of person these days), making war obsolete, uniting people despite their governments and all that drivel. In fact the democracies were neglecting growing threats while posing for the cameras as statesmen, and the League made this problem dramatically worse.

In that sense it resembles the United Nations today. I think the UN is a lot worse; especially on the Middle East its influence is malevolent and far from trivial. It contains more odious regimes and is more brazen. But it has the same general effect within the West: It lulls the citizens and even politicians in democracies into believing there’s a mighty force for good operating quietly out there so we can all go back to sleep.

So consider this. If there’d been no League of Nations to make soothing sounds in the 1920s and flap ineffectively in the 1930s, could the response of the West to Mussolini, Hitler and Imperial Japan possibly have been more feeble? Or would the absence of this soothing illusion have made it more forceful?

The answer is almost certainly yes. Not necessarily forceful enough to prevent war. But more forceful.

The absence of a fake world government with false resolve certainly couldn’t have made the response of the democracies less effective. But the presence of the League did. That’s why I say it was not merely useless but actively harmful.

History does furnish some important rules of thumb. Things like “Don’t attack the Anglosphere” and “don’t invade Russia” and “Don’t marry Henry VIII.” Of course the last one is of limited practical application today. But it was a solid one in its day.

Remember, it was Catherine of Aragon’s marriage to Henry that resulted, albeit indirectly, in England’s break with Rome. And to his marriage to Anne Boleyn which proved fatal to her while giving England Elizabeth I. And his marriage to Jane Seymour killed her giving birth to Henry’s only legitimate son, the sickly and short-reigned Edward VI. Etc.

Meanwhile, one peculiarity in this whole story is that Henry VIII wasn’t the first Tudor Catherine of Aragon married. His father Henry VII, who’d successfully asserted the Tudors’ highly irregular claim to the throne by brute force, was bent and determined to ally England with Spain against France. And so he first managed to marry Catherine to Henry’s older brother Arthur.

It was typical of the dynastic marriages of that time. The bride and groom had never met when they got engaged, which isn’t that surprising since she was two at the time and he was not yet one. They were then married by proxy in 1499, when neither was yet five, and began corresponding in Latin. (When they finally met ten days before their real wedding, which was November 14 1501, they discovered that, having been taught different pronunciations of Latin, they could not actually speak to one another.)

Oh well. I don’t know that you could actually call the marriage unhappy so much as brief. Both fell ill within months and Arthur died on April 2, 1502. Henry VII didn’t give up, though, and after resisting Henry VIII did marry his brother’s widow shortly after he became king in 1509.

The Tudors really were a scurvy lot. They began their tortuous ascent to the throne when Owen Tudor, a Welsh adventurer, surreptitiously married the widow of Henry V, Catherine of Valois, the charming French princess in Shakespeare’s play “Henry V,” provoking a law against secretly marrying royal widows. And on that slender pretext, given that neither Owen nor his wife was in the line of descent from English kings, they schemed and plotted, fought and married their way to the throne where they produced not merely the cold and brutal Henry VII and the scary Henry VIII but Bloody Mary before fizzling out after holding the throne for just over a century, and having endless heir problems from Henry VIII’s lack of sons to Elizabeth’s lack of progeny, which in turn brought the revolting Stuarts to the throne because Henry VII had married Henry VIII’s sister to the King of Scotland.

It is typical of this conniving dynasty that they would have poached the mythical name of “Arthur” from the mists of English history to reinforce their shaky claim to the throne. And that he should never have sat on it.

OK, so maybe the rule should be don’t marry or crown Tudors. All in all, poor Arthur is a bit player in the story. But Catherine, who never accepted her divorce from Henry VIII and died unhappily within a few years, would certainly have done better to remain in Spain and never marry any Tudor of any description.

Well, this surprised me. November 13 is the anniversary of the first ever true free helicopter flight. It doesn’t surprise me that it was Nov. 13. Why shouldn’t it be? What surprises me is that it was in 1907.

I figured helicopters came a long time after airplanes. They seem more mechanically challenging and more likely to fail catastrophically. So when you think of all those weird airplane crates and suchlike contraptions collapsing in old jerky films it’s hard to believe a helicopter didn’t fly to bits in the first three seconds if not, indeed, while still on the drawing board.

Instead, it turns out, model helicopters in a very loose sense had existed in China since about 400 B.C., basically bamboo rotors you spun with a perpendicular stick. Of course Leonardo famously sketched a plan that could not be built with Renaissance technology. But various small models actually flew a bit in the 18th century in both Russia and France (the latter using turkey feathers) and in 1861 a Frenchman named Gustave de Ponton d’Amécourt made a functioning steam model.

So what happened in 1907? Actually not much. It got about 1 foot in the air for 20 seconds or so. Not exactly intercontinental. And indeed it wasn’t until 1936 that a genuinely practical helicopter took to the air and stayed in it, the Focke-Wulf Fw 61. So yes, the helicopter took a while to work, and genuinely functioning helicopters came along well after functioning airplanes.

World War I saw significant aerial combat as well as observation, some ground support and a bit of bombing. World War II of course had the Blitz and so on. But no helicopters except toward the end the Sikorsky R-4, used for some search and rescue work in Burma, Alaska and other such difficult terrain.

Still, hope springs eternal. This notion of vertical flight with the capacity to hover and manoeuvre fascinated people and inspired inventors for centuries and, someday soon, will have drones delivering packages right to your door.

Or snooping on you. No matter how clever the invention or benign the intentions humans can make malevolent use of it. But helicopters are still cool.

On one of those “It Happened Today” style sites, Nov. 12 is the date “King Canute of Norway” died in 1035. I think we can do a bit better than that. It’s the date King Canute of England, and the tides, died.

I’m a bit conflicted about Canute, or Knut, or “Knútr inn ríki” or however you’d like to mispronounce his name. I don’t care for the Danish invaders who created such havoc in Saxon England and so weakened the House of Wessex that it semi-perished in 1066.

I’ve never quite recovered from the death of Edmund Ironside in 1016 that might have replaced the genuinely wretched Aethelred the Unready with another glorious king in the tradition of Edgar the Peaceful, Athelstan the Magnificent and Alfred the Great. But it must be admitted that the Danes including Canute’s father, the colourfully named Sveyn Forkbeard, were to some extent welcomed because Aethelred was so awful; cruel, treacherous, weak and despicable.

It is a core maxim of their constitution, and ours, that rulers must be good, not simply to the manner born. And Canute was legitimately a very good king or even “the great”, the translation of “inn ríki” from Old Norse (or so I believe from Wikipedia; it could mean “the doughnut” and I’d be none the wiser).

Hey, some may say. What about the tides? Wasn’t he the arrogant chump who thought he could command the waves?

No. And that’s the point. His obsequious courtiers told him he was so great, so beloved of God, so generally regal and magnificent, that he actually could stop the tide. To which Canute brusquely demanded an empirical test. (No, people weren’t credulous superstitious fools in those bad old days.) He had a chair carried down at low tide, sat in it, ordered the advancing waves to halt and when instead they poured cold salty water into his boots he rebuked his advisors, telling them as king he could get flattery anywhere, any time, free of charge, and what he needed wasn’t yes sire men but people willing to tell him when he was wrong, what he could not or should not do, when he was being an arrogant fool, because otherwise he could not govern properly.

Canute’s successors were a scurvy lot, Harold Harefoot swiped the throne from his half-brother Harthacnut (or Hardicanute or Halfacanute) and swiftly perished,possibly by drinking himself to death. Harthacnut took the throne, had Harefoot’s body dug up, mutilated and flung naked into a mudflat. Aaaah, sibling rivalry.

More stuff happened and finally William the Conqueror grabbed the crown, after which it took 150 years for Magna Carta to nail the Norman kings back into the Saxon box of limited government, the lid of which the executive has been trying to pry off ever since. But as the elite and the people rallied around the cause of limiting government, they consistently remembered the humility and wisdom of Canute, King of England.

We could use a dose of it today too, frankly. Stephen Harper never had it, nor does Kathleen Wynne or Barack Obama. And we are still waiting to see what Justin Trudeau is like in power.

Well, you know what this is the anniversary of. At least if you live in the British part of the Anglosphere. In the United States Memorial Day is the last Monday in May because it arose earlier out of their formative Civil War. But here it’s the day the guns fell silent in 1918. And, be it noted, the day citizens did in 1919.

The first two minute silence in honour of those who died in the line of duty came just a year after the war, part of a tradition inaugurated by King George V. And it is such a powerful event that in the United States Nov. 11 is also set aside, although there it is Veterans Day, rightly honouring those who did come home.

Some people grow careless as time passes. And of course other wars, large and small, have been fought since the “Great War,” wars that did not end on Nov. 11. As were other wars, large and small, crucial and minor in their strategic and historical impact, before World War I. But there was something different about that war.

The scale of the slaughter, the depth of commitment of all society’s resources, the sense of the grand civilizational stakes, rightly made it a focal point for all that commemoration. As indeed did the American Civil War for the United States. It’s superficially curious that the American version of Remembrance Day should have come not from the Revolutionary War and the founding of the nation. But it makes sense.

The Revolutionary War was, in terms of casualties, a far smaller affair. 18^th century casualty lists are necessarily highly approximate but Wikipedia estimates the Revolutionary side suffered 6,824 killed in battle, and “25,000 to 70,000 dead from all causes” with British losses smaller. But that’s not the real point.

Somehow the Revolutionary War seems to have confirmed a revolution in hearts and minds earlier, as well as yielding the highly celebratory Independence Day that commemorates the cause for which those men (and some women) suffered and died rather than the sacrifice. But the Civil War tested that nation on a scale, and within its community, that overshadows the Revolutionary War in terms of its historical scope. As Lincoln rightly put it, the Civil War rather than the Revolutionary War tested whether self-government can endure.

In the same way, one can point to the Napoleonic Wars or even the Spanish Armada as vital to Anglosphere liberty. But somehow it was the showdown in 1914-18, when everyone was in it both by serving, having family members or friends serve, losing loved ones, and by the commitment of all society’s resources to a contest requiring perseverance on top of all the other qualities it tested to the utmost.

On Nov. 11 we remember the dead of all those wars, those who returned wounded in body, mind or spirit, and those who came back relatively unscathed having risked all for our way of life. World War I is the focus of a much broader commemoration, and rightly so.

They knew it a year later. Something had to be done to mark the war that had not ended all wars but somehow came to stand for all of them. And it still must, and is.

Lest we forget.

On this day in 1775 the United States Marine Corps was born. Not especially gloriously, and not especially successfully, the “Continental Marines” being allowed to lapse in 1783 and not recreated until 1797. But despite official neglect and hostility, it has become one of the greatest and most storied fighting forces in human history.

For some reason nobody quite knew what to do with the Marines. Being a naval army or some such, they were forever being squeezed in peacetime interservice rivalries, only to rise to the occasion in times of war. Initially created for ship-to-ship fighting, they distinguished themselves against the Barbary Pirates in the early 19^th century and the Mexican-American War, but were confined mostly to blockade duty and other shipboard combat in the Civil War (“tell it to the Marines” being an insult not a compliment in those days, implying lack of direct experience of war or anything else) and languished through the late 19^th century before again springing into action in the Spanish-American War.

Thus they were a mainstay of America’s hasty mobilization and deployment in the latter stages of World War I, including their famous “Retreat? Hell, we just got here!” stand at Belleau Wood in June 1918, officially renamed Bois de la Brigade de Marine,” and of course took on the bulk of fighting in the Pacific Theatre in World War II, becoming rather oddly a corps containing six divisions (and five air wings). Despite hostility from Harry Truman (who sneeringly dismissed it as “nothing but a police force” shortly before the brilliant Inchon landing, and an attempt by Congress to abolish the Corps entirely, they were again called on to respond quickly in Korea and again did so, and have been a key part of America’s many mobile wars since.

Like the rest of the U.S. military, they have been overworked and underfunded lately. But their historical resilience will no doubt see them through this crisis too, as presidents far more keen to use force than to prepare for it find the “First to Fight” Marine Corps indispensable to America’s security.

Despite their odd role, and continual battles against bureaucracy, or possibly precisely because of it, the Marines have always been forced to be innovative in their doctrines as well as rigorous in their training, pioneering amphibious assaults and mobile warfare while maintaining an exceptional degree of readiness and toughness.

There is a lesson here about the disadvantages of winning bureaucratic and political battles and being coddled by the state. And there is certainly a lesson about the importance of justifiably proud military units in the life of civilized societies.

Happy Birthday, Marine Corps.

Speaking of Naziism, Nov. 9 is the anniversary of “Kristallnacht” in 1938, when synagogues were burned, Jewish businesses looted, hundreds murdered and tens of thousands rounded up and sent to concentration camps in Germany and Austria. It was a firebell ringing in the night.

Now Kristallnacht was not the Holocaust. It was destructive and ominous. But it primarily was an attack on property rather than a mass slaughter. The concentration camps of 1938 were not those of 1943. And yet the implication was clear.

I do not say “the message”. There is far too much talk of messages nowadays, as though words were deeds. The implication of Kristallnacht can of course be put into words and it conveyed information. It was that Jews in Germany were not protected by law. But the implication was that they would one day be slaughtered, not that they were unpopular with those in power.

It is one thing to be the victim of social discrimination and even structured legal discrimination. And it is a bad thing. But it is far worse to be in a very real sense outside the law, to know that whatever formal protections you do possess are a façade and an illusion, that no one will be prosecuted for denying you your restricted rights and that, indeed, the state is very likely to do it itself.

In the case of Nazi Germany, there has been considerable debate about when the Holocaust became inevitable in something like the form it eventually took, how early it was planned, and how early people should have understood what was coming, both inside and outside the Third Reich.

My own answer is that it was implicit in Naziism from the outset. Events have an internal and often relentless logic because ideas do. Once you deny the humanity of, say, the Jews, as Hitler did openly in writing as early as Mein Kampf and doubtless much earlier in conversation and oratory and in his own thinking, you will necessarily travel down a road to unspeakable atrocities.

Kristallnacht was one step on that road. Deliberate, premeditated, designed in some sense not just to desensitize Germans to what was coming but to send them “a message” about it. But the message was about actions to come, not just striking an attitude.

Many people outside Germany, and inside it, found the events of Nov. 9 1938 ominous. But not ominous enough. They reacted as though it was an unfortunate thing based on unfortunate ideas but not as the inexorable unfolding of the inner logic of anti-Semitism.

For a time after 1945, the world learned not to ignore such events. Not perfectly and not everywhere, but with a degree of alertness conspicuously absent before World War II.

Lately, regrettably, we seem to have lost that alertness. And in forgetting our history, we increase the risk of repeating it.