47 The Hedge School Culture

Posted by on May 11, 2015 in Ireland | 0 comments Since arriving in Dublin last June, I’ve often noted to visitors and friends my appreciation of the vibrant culture of lifelong learning not only in the city, but throughout Ireland. The array of courses and other educational activities scheduled throughout the year for adults—most of them free—means there’s something for everyone and for every question or mood. Thanks to being on sabbatical, I have been able to take advantage of quite a few of these opportunities. As my hundreds of pages of notes and thousands of photographs attest, I have spent the year being a learner, and it’s been wonderful. With so many intriguing offerings, choosing what to attend is a problem. The universities, colleges of every size and type, museums, libraries and other institutions, and even magazines and various private societies regularly give one-off or multisession courses for adults on a host of academic and practical subjects. By the end of my sabbatical, I’ll have completed three of these with University College Dublin: a course on the Easter Rising of 1916, another on the War of Independence 1919-22, and a third on James Joyce and the National Library. The quality of the teaching and information is very high–I’m quite picky, being a teacher myself–and all three courses have included the latest scholarship. Every week there are new programs and events advertised at venues around the city: lectures and book launches, exhibitions, concerts, poetry and fiction readings, walking tours and house tours, festivals, special events and tours at museums, film screenings and discussions, hands-on activities like art classes or writing classes, panels and debates, and every other sort of program you could imagine. Two nationally sponsored events, “Heritage Week” in August (see “7 Heritage”) and “Culture Night” in September (see “13 Folding Landscapes”), invite the public behind the scenes of history, scholarship, art, music, writing, and architecture for free tours, lectures, and more. I attended twelve different events during Heritage Week and regretted the things I missed. And what’s even more impressive is that almost all of these events are “absolutely jammers,” and many are booked out far in advance. I’ve learned to arrive early and claim my seat. On Easter Monday, the Irish television station RTÉ took over O’Connell Street, a broad avenue at the center of town, for an all day program called “Road to the Rising.” The idea was to host an array of events—some serious, some just for...
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46 Into the Night

Posted by on May 4, 2015 in Ireland | 4 comments A few weeks ago I spent a morning hunting down a dark, forbidding “pit” that is mentioned in passing in a poem by William Butler Yeats. As is well known, I’m mad to see places where literature or history happened and to “walk in the steps” of the people, the events, the images, or the ideas that came into being in a particular set of coordinates. Yeats’s “pit” or “cleft” or “Alt” or “Glen” has been on my mind for a long time. In “Man and the Echo,” one of Yeats’s last poems, the speaker–or speakers, depending on your interpretation of the two voices–reflects on his life and life’s work as illness, death, and “night” approach, using the dialogue between a human voice and its echo to probe these vexing questions. The poem was published in The Atlantic Monthly in January 1939, the same month Yeats died, along with two other moody, self-critical poems. The place where the echo cited in the poem occurs is a real one, a rock-faced incision on the slope of Knocknarea in County Sligo. In the poem, Yeats describes it like this: Man. In a cleft that’s christened Alt Under broken stone I halt At the bottom of a pit That broad noon has never lit…. In Yeats Country around Sligo, literary detectives can easily find the locations of most of the poems that are connected to place. “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” from the eponymous poem, Dooney Rock from “The Fiddler of Dooney,” and Sleuth Wood (actually Slish Wood) from “The Stolen Child” are all sites on Lough Gill near Sligo—well-signposted with parking and paths and noted on all tourist maps. The same goes for Glencar Waterfall, also from “The Stolen Child,” located a few miles from Sligo town on Glencar Lake. which even has a staircase to take you up alongside the noisy torrent— Where the wandering water gushes From the hills above Glen-Car, In pools among the rushes That scarce could bathe a star… —and back to the parking lot along a wooded path. A few miles on the other side of Sligo town you can visit Lissadell House, once the home of the Gore-Booth family, where the young Yeats visited often. He later commemorated both the place and the two Gore-Booth daughters in his poem “In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markievicz”: The light of evening, Lissadell, Great windows open to the...
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45 Divided by a Common Language V

Posted by on Apr 27, 2015 in Ireland | 1 comment The phrases “No problem!” and “No Bother!” (sometimes “bother” is pronounced “bodder”) come up a lot in Ireland. In addition to meaning “Don’t worry, you are not causing a problem,” these phrases can also mean “Yes, I’ll do it,” as in “May we have a jug of tap water?” “No bother.” To me, such responses exemplify an accommodating attitude that I encounter everywhere here, in public and in private. I don’t like to characterize groups of people—it’s a dangerous road to go down, and you often find yourself face to face with a stereotype and a raft of exceptions. But for what it’s worth, many people who come to Ireland observe this friendly, easygoing demeanor, and I’ve heard Irish people note it as a distinctive quality. While visiting the Rock of Cashel in County Tipperary a few weeks ago, we had a particularly knowledgeable and eloquent guide named Jane tell us lots of great stories about the thousand-year-old monument, a fortified set of ecclesiastical buildings atop a large limestone hill overlooking broad green valleys on all sides. Jane told us about the astonishing exploits of Myler McGrath, a sixteenth-century priest associated with Cashel who somehow managed to rise in both the Anglican and Catholic churches–even though they were competing for believers at the time–as well as serve in parliament, raise eight children with two wives, and occupy over seventy different clerical positions. He was both a Catholic bishop and an Anglican archbishop and no stranger to corruption. In telling us how much fun the locals have with this story in conversation today, Jane said, “We make a dog’s dinner of it, I can tell you.” Imagine how most dogs eat their dinner, enthusiastically and wrecklessly gobbling up every morsel as fast as they possibly can, and you’ll easily grasp the meaning of this wonderful expression. Overheard while standing outside of a crowded lecture hall: “There’s not a seat left in there! It’s absolutely jammers!” Enough said. A phrase I hear all the time comes at the beginning of a statement: “To be honest with you….” I’m not sure why it’s used so frequently in Ireland, but like “Great stuff!” (see “32 Divided by a Common Language, the Third”), the phrase serves as a verbal filler, a bridge between thoughts, a way to fill a gap as the speaker revs up for the meaty part of the sentence forming in her...
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44 Graveyards, Graveyards, and More Graveyards

Posted by on Apr 20, 2015 in Ireland | 4 comments During a Christmas trip to Dublin I hosted for my brothers and their families in 2001, they all accused me of only taking them to see “prisons and graveyards, prisons and graveyards.” I must confess that they were right. On that trip family members flew in from all over the US to meet for the first time at Kilmainham Gaol, a grim and very cold prison built in the 1790s that housed many political prisoners and that in 1916 saw fourteen of the infamous executions of the Easter Rising. Over the next five days, we visited a magnificent five thousand year old ceremonial tomb, several tumbledown graveyards at ruined monasteries, a pet cemetery at Powerscourt Estate, and a few miscellaneous graves and graveyards along the way. Since we actually visited only one prison on that trip, albeit a very daunting one, it would have been more accurate to sum up our itinerary as “graveyards, graveyards, and more graveyards.” Not counting churches, most of which have people buried inside them, but including Megalithic tombs and ruined monasteries, there are at least eight or nine graveyards on the itinerary for the student trips to Ireland I lead every two years. During this sabbatical year spent in Ireland, our visitors will no doubt confirm that graveyards have figured in our sightseeing with them to an abnormal degree. And without my intending to go in this direction, four of my blogs have been exclusively about graveyards: Jerpoint Abbey (“10 In our arts we find our bliss”), remembering the dead of World War I (“21 Remembrance”); Yeats’s famous grave at Drumcliff Churchyard (“33 Under Ben Bulben”); and Cromwell’s cabbage garden turned cemetery turned city park (“36 The Cabbage Gardens”). I freely admit to having an obsession, but the accidents of history and geography have also played a part in making cemeteries an important theme in the Emerald Isle. This is a country of graves. Ireland’s long history of human habitation (since at least 8000 BCE), small size (Ireland is smaller than the state of Georgia), preponderance of rocky and boggy land unsuitable for burials, and island status mean that here the dead compete for space with the living. And in addition to the regular graveyards, everywhere you go you see monuments and inscriptions commemorating those who “died for Ireland”–at their birthplaces, their schools, their places of work, the places where they died, and so on. Ireland’s perpetual “underdog” or as some...
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43 Ladies Who Sweat

Posted by on Apr 11, 2015 in Ireland | 0 comments As we move into the last three months of our stay in Ireland, I am conscious of the stories I particularly want to tell in this blog, as I only have eight or ten weeks or posts remaining. I’ve known since last summer that at some point I wanted to write about the remarkable women I’ve met in my water aerobics class “Aquafit” and in my exercise class “Active for Life” at the gym across the street from our apartment, SportsCo. You will have perhaps noticed that I mention these women often in my blog as sources of information, anecdotes, and insights about life in Ireland. They have also been valuable exercise buddies and great company for me three times a week whenever I’m not traveling. I’m really going to miss them when I leave in June. When we were apartment hunting in Dublin in June 2014, I had my eye out for swimming pools I would be able to join and was delighted when our new landlord told us of a gym literally across the street from the Gasworks. SportsCo is highly rated in this city, where there lots of gyms. I like everything about it—the people, the rooms and equipment, the hours, the variety of options. The instructors–Warren, Kelly, and Seán–are patient, creative, and inspiring; I especially like it when Kelly, who is from Brazil, teaches us samba routines in the pool. And the gym has a wonderful swimming pool, a twenty-five metre ozone treated facility that is ideal for lap swimming and has repeatedly been rated the best in Dublin. I don’t want to make this an advertisement for the place, but let me just say that my SportsCo membership, which includes unlimited use of the facilities and all classes, costs me significantly less than my YMCA membership in Atlanta. Since it takes me less than five minutes to get there, I really have no excuse for missing my workout, even on cold and blustery days. Last summer I started my gym membership with a plan to swim three or four times a week, but I also decided to try a couple of the classes offered. I have to confess to being a water aerobics snob before this sabbatical. As someone who has swum laps regularly for years, I thought such classes were nothing more than water playtime, fine for old people or nonswimmers, but not for me....
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