This will be the best weekend of the year

A few weeks ago, in the little “God [or] Devil is in the Details” section in Eye Weekly, I wrote about the melting snow leaving behind a winter’s worth of filth, using part of a Leonard Cohen quote from his 1966 book Beautiful Losers to describe it. I wanted to post the whole quote, and waited for the first warm day. And waited, for weeks, with the rest of the city, for that moment when the city wakes up warm and is at its happiest moment all year. It starts today — but will be experienced most acutely on Saturday and Sunday, when the entire city will feel like Montreal did for Cohen when spring sprung:

In Montreal spring is like an autopsy. Everyone wants to see the inside of the frozen mammoth. Girls rip off their sleeves and the flesh is sweet and white, like wood under green bark. From the streets a sexual manifesto rises like an inflating tire, “the winter has not killed us again!

Perhaps this is what Robert Fulford referred to when he wrote “this is, among other things, the most revolting book ever written in Canada” or when the Globe and Mail called it “verbal masturbation.” These defenders of 1960s Toronto the Good values may have preferred this biblical ode to spring found in Song of Solomon (still a particularly erotic section of the Good Book):

For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone;
The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land;
The fig tree putteth forth her green figs, and the vines with the tender grape, give a good smell. Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away. (Chapter II, 11-12)

Which ever version you prefer, drop whatever you’re doing this weekend and go for a walk — for an hour or all day. In the summer the city feels empty on weekends because people go to cottages or vacation, or sit at home in the air conditioning, away from the smog. But everybody is still here this early in the season, and they will all be all out on the street, and it will be as utopic and crowded and beautiful as Toronto can get.

Photo of a 1917 dance performance at Elizabeth Playground courtesy of Toronto Archives