May 27, 2022
As Cathy and I walked from the dark room at Trinity College where the Book of Kells is kept hermetically sealed, we overheard an older gentleman ask, quite earnestly, “Are these books real?”
I suppose you can’t blame him. We live in a world where the image of Tom Cruise . . . did that man ever meet a mirror he didn’t love? . . . is plastered on every double decker bus in Dublin promoting “Top Gun Maverick” a “bigger than life” character I suspect a good part of the world is convinced is real, and if he isn’t, should be.
And you have to admit that the Long Room at Trinity College . . . a room that Cathy and I agree leaves in the dust any cathedral for jaw-dropping, breath-taking, awe-inspiring wonder. . . looks as if it was taken from a scene in Harry Potter.
After the gentleman asked if the books were real, I overheard his friend say, quite matter of factly, “I’ve never much cared for books.”
Boy, are you in the wrong place, fella.
And not just books.
Have you ever considered how many ways we now have to learn? I was thinking about that this morning in the glow of this laptop as Cathy sleeps in the predawn gloom of our hotel room. In the span of one day, Cathy and I
- sat atop an open-air double decker bus darting around Dublin as the driver explained over a PA system that an expression I had understood my whole life to be “on tenderhooks” is actually “on tenterhooks” and referred to wooden frames used to stretch poplin fabric to dry;
- downloaded a nifty app on our smart phones to hold to your ear as we walked through the Book of Kells exhibit at Trinity College and learned that 9th century mischievous monks in some drafty monastery on the Isle of Iona would often hide editorial comments in their work such as “It’s so cold in here” and “When will this be over?” and could “erase” a mistake by simply scraping off more hide from the dried deer skin upon which they were drawing;
- sat in an “immersive” room at the General Post Office and learned that the heroic, but sadly foolish leaders of the 1916 uprising were mystified that most Dubliners did not share their fervor and one bold woman, ticked off that the “rebellion” was disrupting her daily life, marched pass the British military barricade and gave Patrick Pearse a piece of her pissed off mind.
- walked quietly through Kilmainham Gaol and learned, old school, from a docent who had a voice somewhere between Liam Neeson and Peter O’Toole, that the jail housed not only the te leaders of the Easter uprising, but children, some unaccompanied by parents, one as young as three year’s old, for the heinous crime of stealing food when the famine was so awful that many people, without a roof, and without food, hoped to get caught so that they might have both in prison.
- sat at the bar of O’Donoghues listening to three gents play “The Irish Rover” and a kind young man, seeing that I was sipping “the golden liquid” asked what whiskey I had chosen. When I told him that it was Bushmill’s Black, he allowed as how that was a fine choice, but then proceeded to educate Cathy and I on your finer whiskeys, how to smell them, what scents to pick up, never with ice, and then as a welcome to Ireland, and to the surprise of the bar tender, bought us a shot of his favorite Midleton Very Rare, which costs 35 euros! When we reciprocated and bought his three friends each a pint and him his favorite Midleton Rare, he was embarrassed that we felt obliged, gave Cathy a hug, and me a “look-in-the-eye” handshake.
I don’t know. Seems this glorious morning as Cathy stirs and the sun creeps through the crack in the folds of the heavy drapes, that there is just too much to learn and too little time, no matter the means, old or new, with which we are afforded to make the attempt.
We’re off to Newgrange and the Mourne Mountains today, but my favorite image of Dublin was one I caught in The Winding Staircase bookstore north of the Liffey.
The light was just right. She’s always learning.
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"Not All Those Who Wander Are Lost" 