I used to be very fond of going to an island in Lake Huron – Manitoulin – and I fell very much in love with Manitoulin when I went there in '79. I was trying to write then and was writing some of my Leg book. I was listening to music a lot, I had a cassette, I had two cassettes. One of them – both Mozart – one of them the great Mass in G Minor, one of the Requiem. I tend to get fixated on pieces of music sometimes and I will play it again and again and again as I’m fixated on Bach Choral Preludes. Which reminds me, this morning, I heard a horrible orchestral version of one of the great organ preludes and… but that’s neither here nor there.

I wandered a lot around Gore Bay which was the chief town on Manitoulin. I talked to a lot of people, I was in a strange mood.  I normally never start a conversation, I’m rather shy and rather diffident. But I found myself opening conversations, I even went to church on Sunday because I enjoyed the feeling of the church and the singing and the feeling of community. And as I left after six weeks I was approached by some of the elders in Gore Bay with an astonishing proposition. They said, 'You seem to have enjoyed your stay here, you seem to love the place and to love us. And I think we love you'. They said, 'Our general practitioner for 40 years has just retired. Would you be interested in taking his place?' They said, 'The province of Ontario will give you a house. How would you feel about being a village doctor in Manitoulin?' I was moved to tears by this and thought about it, though when I was realistic rather than romantic I thought this... this can’t work. The… in a recent… recently when Eric Kandel introduced me to an audience, he introduced me as a public intellectual and I said to the audience, 'That’s absolutely wrong', I said, 'basically, I’m a village doctor'. And the notion of myself as a village doctor is there even though I couldn’t become one in reality, to Manitoulin.