Past Posts
22 Of Chandeliers and Plasterwork
One of the best things about travel is learning to appreciate things—abstract things and thing things—you might never learn to appreciate at home. And by travel I mean a trip to the next town over, or to a café or grocery store on the other side of your own town, as well as travel that includes long distances, strange new ways of doing things, and languages you don’t speak. You just need to change your perspective, look through others’ eyes, ponder assemblages of things and ideas that are not...
21 Remembrance
Photo above taken at the Irish National War Memorial Gardens in Dublin, designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens and completed in 1938 to commemorate the 49,000 Irish (including emigrants) who died in the Great War. Decades of neglect followed, reflecting the struggling economy and politicization of honoring World War I dead. Restoration began in the 1980s funded by organizations in both the Republic and Northern Ireland. The gardens were rededicated in 2006. Ninety-six years ago at the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of the eleventh month, World War I formerly...
20 More Than Glass
The first story in James Joyce’s Dubliners begins with a child standing in the street, looking in a window to the room where a priest he knows is dying; the boy studies “the lighted square of window: and night after night I had found it lighted inthe same way, faintly and evenly.* In one of the most beautiful passages of prose every written, the final story in the collection, “The Dead,” ends with the main character Gabriel Conroy looking out the window of a Dublin hotel to the snow falling...
19 Wild Swans at Coole
“Easter, 1916” is probably William Butler Yeats’s most important poem, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” his most well known, but for those who read a lot of Yeats, “The Wild Swans at Coole” may be his most beloved. It is certainly the most popular poem among the students I bring to Ireland every two years: they compete fiercely to read the poem aloud when we visit Coole Park, and sometimes we have to have more than one performance. Over the weekend Ron and I were down in Limerick and...
18 The Belfast Miracle
I first visited Belfast, Northern Ireland, with my family in the early days of January, 1998—before the Good Friday Peace Agreement that came about later that year. A ceasefire had been in place for several years. Though the city’s resolute citizens tried to go about their lives in a normal way, the tension was palpable. Police cars that looked more like tanks roamed the streets, and almost every shop had its burly guard at the door. As an American you were forgiven for saying the wrong thing or asking...
17 Divided by a Common Language
When Michael O’Brien was guiding Agnes Scott students around Ireland, we would occasionally come upon an English word that one of us didn’t understand, or that had multiple meanings depending on context, or that was simply unfamiliar, or that didn’t exist in American English or in Irish English. Michael would give a look of mock despair and exclaim, “Divided by a common language!” While Irish English is perfectly understandable most of the time in both vocabulary and accent, such moments do arise. One of the most appealing characteristics of...
16 Autumn Gardens
“Fall” is the more common term in English, fhómhair in Irish (pronounced like the English “four” but with a more obvious diphthong) but “fall gardens” even if lower-cased sounds like THE fall in THE garden and I don’t mean that. I mean that time of year “When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang / Upon the boughs which shake against the cold,” that time of year when gardens start to sag and fade but are still beautiful, maybe even more so, as their colors blend with the...
15 The Mountains of Mourne
On our driving map of Ireland, quite a few roads in southeast County Down are highlighted in green, which means they are “scenic.” The map is pretty reliable on this point, though of course there are many non-green routes that deserve to be so designated, as Ron and I indignantly note when we’re driving on them. This green-striped region is one of the few parts of Ireland I’d never visited, and it is also where the woman Agnes Scott College is named for lived as a child, the young...
14 Uisce Éireann / Irish Water
On a rainy day last January I was with a group of students at Kylemore Abbey, an elegant Gothic Revival edifice set by itself on a lake in Connemara. The enterprising nuns of the Abbey have a large gift store and café going there, so Kylemore is quite a tourist destination for both its beauty and its amenities. While in the bathroom that day, I noticed a gushing faucet in one of the sinks. I couldn’t make it stop running, so I reported it to someone in the café...
13 Folding Landscapes
Rummaging through boxes in my parents’ attic one day back in the seventies—hoping to find items to fill up my new apartment—I came upon a pink-flowered china coffee server, a pitcher of sorts, lidless and dusty, that had once belonged to my mother’s parents. It wasn’t valuable or useful, but it was kind of pretty, and I remembered seeing it on the mantle in my grandparents’ tiny house when I was five or six. I took it with me and kept it for years in a china cabinet with...