In the Atlantic Canadian magazine Saltwire, John DeMont offers a profile of historian Daniel Samson and his long study of the diary of nineteenth century farmer and philosopher James Barry of Pictou County Nova Scotia.
“The big story of his life,” Daniel Samson, an associate professor at Brock University, who is writing a biography of Barry, told me, “is that of a man in search of an intellectual relationship with the world and struggling to find it in Six Mile Brook.”
Six Mile Brook, if you don’t know, is a part of Pictou County that Samson describes as being “just a brook, a river, a harbour, a gulf, and an ocean away from the colonial metropoles of London and Glasgow.”
Samson has been offering frequent samples from the Barry diaries on Twitter. I have mixed feelings about Twitter and only visit it occasionally, but tweets like these almost redeem the medium:
https://twitter.com/ruralcolonialNS/status/1395912513833820165
