Today, our first full day in Dublin, dawned bright and sunny, and the sunshine held out through most of the day until intermittent showers — Irish weather — arrived in mid-afternoon. It was a gorgeous day to walk outside, so we left the hotel right after breakfast, a hearty and good breakfast in the restaurant inside The Mont Hotel, and walked to Trinity College to see the Book of the Kells.
Turned out that — and I suspected this would be the case — hordes of people had already bought tickets to see it that morning, and we could be accommodated only at 11 A.M. An interesting conversation with the two young people at the ticket counter. The man asked where we were from, and Steve said Little Rock. “Oh, Colorado,” he replied. Steve smiled and said, “Arkansas.” Then the woman said with a thick Dublin accent, “Yes, I’ve been to Little Rock many times. I’m from Texas.” I asked where she was from in Texas and whether she was a Trinity graduate, and she replied that yes, she graduated from Trinity and was from Dallas. Did I say that she has acquired a Dublin accent you could spoon on toast and eat like thick marmalade?
Since we had nothing to do for an hour and a half except wait for our 11 A.M. appointment to view the Book of the Kells, we strolled around the sunshine, admiring the stately Georgian buildings in the square with the chapel. We poked our heads into the chapel where we could hear music, and could see through the half-opened door into the chapel the choir singing.
We thought perhaps a service was going on, so we looked for a way to enter the chapel, and tried a staircase going up to a gallery (as the sign told us) to the right. A young man then appeared and told us the gallery wasn’t open and we were welcome to come to the 10:45 Eucharist for which the choir was practicing. We thanked him, and then a tall gray-headed thin man in a cassock with imposing rows of buttons down the front materialized and, beaming, affirmed how welcome we’d be at the Eucharist.
I’m not sure why, but the chipper, smiling, not totally convincing way in which people connected to many Anglican churches (the Church of Ireland is Anglican, after all) invite you to services puts me in mind of chirping birds. It amuses me. It’s such Sunday behavior, such church manners, and so divorced from everyday reality — though I’m indeed grateful for the welcome and the politeness at which we Anglo types (sometimes) excel.
Since the chapel was out for a sit-down, we walked across the street to a coffee place we’d seen, Costa, a Dublin chain, I believe, and shared a cup of cappuccino and a Bakewell tart. The tart was only passably okay — dried out and, as Steve said, too sweet, with too little jam filling. I did enjoy sitting in the beautiful space occupied by the coffee shop, with its rich Georgian carved wood of which I took a number of photos, and with large windows overlooking Trinity’s park.
About 10:30, we ambled back to Trinity library to get in line for our “Book of Kells Experience” at 11. The “experience” itself was less than scintillating, I’m sad to say. We had been there back in 1990 when you could see Book of the Kells at no fee, that is, you could see the one page turned open for that day. This time around, the “experience” cost a hefty fee of €16. There’s a lot of fanfare around the viewing now, and, with the costly entrance ticket, it inevitably makes the viewing appear somewhat commercialized, in my view. It cheapens what was previously a rather chaste and simple walk-in-stand-in-line-look that had a quiet, reverential quality to it.
Now, you compete with hordes of other tourists, many of them oblivious to the fact that we’re all craning our necks to try to read the boards in the entrance exhibits which explain the chronology of the Book of Kells, its connection to other ancient Irish gospels, etc. By the time you make your way through the maze of entrance boards and find yourself in the very dark room with the Book of Kells on display in its plexiglass case, you find the book itself anticlimactic, and you're irritated by the rude, clueless behavior of fellow voyeurs who hog exhibit cases and block exhibit boards.
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| Book of Kells folio 202v, scanned from Bernard Meehan, The Book of Kells: An Illustrated Introduction to the Manuscript in Trinity College Dublin (London: Thames and Hudson, 1994), p 11, available online for sharing at Wikimedia Commons |
My recollection of the page we saw in 1990 was that it was glowing with bejewelled colors, intricate designs. The page exhibited today was the page starting Luke’s narrative of the temptation in the desert, and appeared rather grim, dark, and murky, with a small black devil perching next to Jesus to tempt him. Then it was over and out we walked into Trinity’s library, and that was, by contrast, an exhilarating experience — the shelves and shelves of old books, a quintessential old European library with high ladders allowing someone (librarians? scholars?) to reach the shelves.
I love the marble busts lining the walkway through the library, busts at the end of each stack of books. I took a photo of Dr. Swift in a droll hat cocked to one side on the top of his head. And there in the middle of it all, Brian Boru’s harp. Which never belonged to Brian at all, since it dates from some five hundred years after Brian, albeit it’s a very old Irish harp and is now the Irish national symbol. It was given to Trinity by a McMahon of Clare, so I wonder if this is how it ended up being equated with Brian Boru, since the McMahons of Clare are a Dalcassian family related to Brian? But evidently a French commentator is the one who began spreading the legend (in the 1700s) that Brian owned it.
Trinity and its enchanting library behind us, we walked a half block or so to Hodges Figgis and bought more books than we ought to have bought — I did that, rather, not Steve. The books were irresistible: Irina Georgescu’s Danube, of which I’d read a review in The Guardian; Sean O’Callaghan’s To Hell or Barbados, the Ethnic Cleansing of Ireland (which I suspect is a load of tosh but want to read nonetheless); J.P. Mallory’s The Origins of the Irish, Niall Williams’ History of the Rain, Elizabeth Strout’s Tell Me Everything, and A.A. Gill’s Table Talk, Salt and Bitter. If it weren’t so large and heavy (we can’t take a library back on the plane), I’d have bought Patrick Gleeson’s Landscapes of Kingship in Medieval Ireland, AD 400-1150, which has much information about the Dalcassians and Brian Boru. My fingers also itched to buy Patrick Joyce’s Remembering Peasants, but I made them obey me and put that book back. There’s always interlibrary loan….
Hodges Figgis, which is the oldest bookstore in Ireland, is such a wonderful place. I love how it’s organized, with tables in the fiction section gathering selections of books by rather discrete categories — e.g., crime novels, which are labeled “Kill and Thrill,” horror novels, science fiction separated from fantasy, and on and on. The Irish section, both non-fiction and fiction, is, as one might anticipate, a marvel to behold. I could spend a lifetime there….
From Hodges Figgis, we then footed it over to George’s Arcade, whose website promised it was open on Sunday. But when we got there, it was no such thing. Almost every booth was shuttered over with plywood. We walked up, and then walked down, and saw very little other than a psychic who had just opened her booth and was sitting on a high stool, head wreathed in a red bandana, reading her cell phone and sucking at a smoothie through a straw. She looked to be no more than a teen.
On the way to Hodges Figgis, we passed an amusing outdoor arrangement of brightly colored sofas and chair at a bar-restaurant called Pygmalion, or, in some of its signs, simply Pyg. I took a number of photos. Young Dubliners and young tourists from all over — I heard Spanish, Italian, French (a conversation between a man from Marseilles and two young men from Québec — were milling about in the section of Dublin around George’s Arcade, standing on street corners vaping, rushing to line up for some kind of loud concert, and so on.
I don’t remember Irish youth acting the way many young Irish people do nowadays, very Americanized and foul-mouthed, pushy, aggressive, heedless of stepping right in front of elderly folks trying to make their way down sidewalks. I think the growing secularization of Ireland and the prosperity it has achieved in recent decades are all to the good, but if the price of these good things is that young people are divorced from any of their better roots (manners, concern for others, compassion, kindness), then the price is surely ambivalent.
We had thought we’d walk from George’s Arcade to Stephen’s Green shopping center, but by the time we’d “done” George’s, we were pooped and we returned to the hotel to have a lie-down. After the cleaning staff came in at long last to do our room, we lay down an hour or so to nap, and after we’d gotten up and had a restorative cup of tea, we walked to a dim sum restaurant I’d read about, Good World, and had a nice late-afternoon meal of cheung fun (one prawn, one pork with mushroom), sticky rice in lotus leaves, prawn and vegetable dumplings, and turnip cakes. The dim sum was very good, but I was quite a bit put off by the greeting we got when we walked through the door, and the man who appeared to be the owner frowned at us and asked if we had a booking — though there were clearly several open tables in the restaurant.
I have no idea what that was about, though I did notice that we were the sole table in the place that was occupied by non-Asians. Next to us was a nice couple in which the husband appeared to be Asian and European, with an Anglo wife. He told us he grew up in Hong Kong and really likes this restaurant. It just seems to me a non-negotiable that the owners and wait staff and greeters and maître d's of restaurants greet all guests kindly and in a welcoming way. Non-negotiable.
After the meal, a walk back in the nice evening air — rain had stopped — and we’re now in for the night. Steve took our laundry down to have it sent to cleaners that the hotel uses, and came back to the room bearing two big glasses of Guiness he had gotten at the hotel bar, asking if I would drink one with him. He has to have known I’d take only a few sips, so this appears to have been his ruse to treat himself to a nightcap of two glasses of stout!
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