Memories of Ireland, part 2

I wrote about my first visit to Ireland last week, and that visit only began a long-term interest in (even fascination with) the place.

In college, one of the first classes I took was on Irish literature. I'd read the poetry of Seamus Heaney and Eavan Boland in high school, and I knew I wanted to know more. That class was one of the best I ever took -- and Eavan Boland even came to read and speak to the class!

The next year I took the same professor's course on Joyce's Ulysses (a great comic book version is online at "Ulysses Seen"), and it was a crazy ride.  I had known before I even went to college that I wanted to spend a year abroad, and reading Joyce's tribute to Dublin cemented in my mind exactly where I wanted to go. His novel is a masterpiece, but I couldn't truly understood it until I lived in Dublin and 1) understood just how walkable it is and 2) really got to know the culture, which, while it is obviously not the same as it was at the turn of the 20th century, still retains echoes and remnants of that time and place.

“For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal.”

Below are some of my best and most indelible memories of going to Trinity College Dublin for my junior year. Some were entirely cliche, and a lot were entirely unexpected:

Memories of Ireland, part 1.

With all the mentions of Guinness and Dublin and the wild west coast of Ireland that I've been seeing lately, I am getting more and more nostalgic for my years of living in and travelling around Ireland. Looking back over what I have written, it's gotten very long!  I hope you all don't lose patience with me.

My father's family is mostly Irish, and my grandmother  was entirely Irish (a Holland by birth, her parents both hailing from County Sligo) and fairly fierce about it.  The family never did any of the typically Irish-American stuff though (other than being Catholic), but there was a true connection to Ireland that was a thread running through the family. My grandparents sent clothes to the poor Irish relations for years, and even visited in the 1960s. My father and two of his siblings had also visited our relations in Kilkenny and Sligo in the late 1970s, and Christmas cards were exchanged regularly.  But most importantly, to my young bookworm self, my grandparents had a print of a WB Yeats poem, "The Fiddler of Dooney," illustrated by Jack B Yeats, on their wall, and I knew that poem so well from visiting them and staring at it -- now it hangs in my parents' house, in the room I stay in when I visit. 

"And dance like a wave of the sea."