"What age is at? It saon is late. 'Tis endless now senne eye or erewone last saw Waterhouse's clogh. They took it asunder, I hurd thum sigh. When will they reassemble it?"
Finnegans Wake --James JoyceThe confusion over time expressed by the woman doing her laundry in Dublin's River Liffey since they disassembled Waterhouse's clock was a feeling I could relate to after an overnight flight from Boston to Shannon Airport on Ireland's west coast took me from 8 p.m. to 6:30 a.m. in a space of five and one-half hours.
Within two hours after landing we were launched on a nine-day bus tour of the country that would see me through 38 hours without sleep by the end of day one. I thought my body's internal clock had indeed been "took asunder" and might never be reassembled.
But the enchantment of being in the towns and countryside so familiar in song and verse made sleep seem unthinkable. Limerick, Killarney, Tipperary, Cork.
On day two the tour looped around spectacular Ring of Kerry, a mountainous peninsula on the southwest coast.
Day three included a stop at Blarney Castle where I was suspended nearly upside down over the edge of the battlements at the top of the castle, the position one must assume to kiss the Blarney stone. This is said to impart the gift of Irish eloquence. However, since I returned, no one has commented on any improvement in my eloquence.
We were in the capital, Dublin, on June 16, the date the city observes Bloomsday, in honor of the fictional Leopold Bloom, hero of James Joyce's Ulysses. As an admirer of Joyce's work, it had long been my wish to retrace Bloom's footsteps on his rounds of the city in Joyce's epic novel. However, it's disappointing to find almost nothing is the same as the Dublin Joyce so meticulously described as it stood on that June day in 1904.
But Davy Byrne's pub is still there, where Bloom stopped for a glass of burgundy and a gorgonzola sandwich and struck up a conversation with Nosey Flynn. Bloom's residence, 7 Eccles Street, which actually existed, was long ago torn down, but the door was preserved and is on display in a pub called The Bailey, which itself appeared in Ulysses as The Burton. Out on the coast at Dalkey, the Martello tower, the setting for the first chapter of the book, still stands.
Getting back to the real world, the towering statue of "The Liberator," Daniel O'Connell, still stands guard at the end of O'Connell Bridge. There are still bullet holes in the figures of the angels surrounding the statue, reminders of the Easter Rising of 1916 when a band of Irish rebels took over the post office on O'Connell Street and fought off the British for days until shelling from a British gunboat on the River Liffey set fire to the post office and forced the rebels to surrender.
There was a visit to massive St. Patrick's Cathedral, built in the 12th Century. Jonathan Swift is entombed here, where "his savage indignation can no longer lacerate the heart," as the Latin epitaph reads.
Leaving Dublin, we headed north through County Donegal with its rocky, unspoiled wilderness. Beautiful lakes, that would be hidden by condos and hotels in the U.S., here have shorelines interrupted only by an occasional thatch-roofed cottage.
From Donegal, we swung through County Sligo where there was a stop at the grave of the man many consider Ireland's greatest poet, William Butler Yeats, in the little churchyard at Drumcliffe. The headstone bears only the simple inscription, "Cast a cold eye on life, on death, horseman pass by."
From Sligo the tour circled through lovely Connemara, where the shopkeepers speak English to American tourists but Gaelic to each other. Connemara is where the movie "The Quiet Man" was filmed, and we passed the stone bridge where John Wayne stopped the carriage to view the homestead of Maureen O'Hara.
The tour ended on fabled Galway Bay. That night there was pub-hopping in the city of Galway, a fitting end to an Irish vacation.
The serenity of the countryside and the friendliness of the people give no hint of this country's tragic and violent history. The English were outraged when Eamon de Valera declared Ireland neutral in World War II. But by the end of World War I, Ireland had been fighting for 752 years. They'd had enough.
