… UD‘s now in Dublin. The city is currently sporting classic Irish weather: exuberantly sunny one moment – opening up amazing, long O’Connell Street vistas – and then wham. A wet black blanket of cloud.
Somewhere in Paul Monette’s Borrowed Time, he quotes from his lover’s Paris notebooks. Back in Paris after years away, the lover describes feeling the drag of nostalgia.
It’s a little like that for me, being in Dublin after having spent a lot of time here when I was much younger.
I’m glad to see O’Connell isn’t gussied up the way I worried it might be. This is still an old and somewhat thready city – the Dublin I recall.
I see the Liffey River and O’Connell Street in two ways, really: With my own particular nostalgias, and with the more objective eyes of someone who reads and re-reads Joyce’s Ulysses. I see not merely scenes from that novel, but scenes from Joyce’s life along the river and street, as I (my feet aching from the long airport corridors) walk and walk, taking it in.
March 14th, 2011 at 4:37AM
I know how you feel about Dublin – I am enjoying the semester in Rome much the same way. Every time I turn a corner there’s something else!