As an English major, it should not be a surprise to anyone that I like books. Thus, I expected to enjoy Dublin quite a bit. Almost everything I read mentioned the rich literary history of the city, and so I had little doubt that I would be thoroughly delighted by whatever things made it so.
It was with this attitude that my Dublin adventure commenced. I walked through the exhibit at the Writer’s Museum, listening to the bullet-pointed version of the lives of the writers on display. I touched the passport and journals of Yeats at the National Library. I stood in awe at the miraculous collection of books towering over me in the Long Room at Trinity College. I found each of them both informative and interesting, and felt that much more connected to past Irish writers because of them.
Still, I felt like I wasn’t as excited as I should be. I had gotten it into my head that stepping into places like the Writer’s Museum, the National Library, and the Long Room would make me want to write my heart at...shouldn’t literary history such as what is displayed in these places be profoundly inspiring?
But I soon found that Dublin’s literary history is really not in the museums. It’s not in the carefully planned exhibits, nor the government buildings with security guards eyeing your every move. It’s not something that can be contained, defined, or put on display.
I found it, instead, in places like the cobblestones of Trinity College, once tread upon by the likes of Swift, Stoker, Wilde, and Beckett. In the basements of used bookstores, where personal notes have been made inside the covers of old copies of O’Flaherty and O’Brien. On the stools of the pubs and the faces of the people inside of them.
It’s all part of the elusive spirit of Ireland that I have begun to sense as my knowledge of the country slowly widens. There’s something here that we don’t have in the States, and it’s rather hard to explain, but it lingers under the surface, connecting the people and scenery, the present and past.
It wasn’t until the bus ride back from Dublin that I truly began to get an inkling of why language and writing have so much significance to the Irish people. The pure, magical beauty of this little island simply demands to be put into words. There is something about the soft curves of the hills, the rampant palette of greens, the jagged, geometrical shapes of the rocks and the frothy blue sea that blows against them that puts one in the mood to create something. Such natural beauty makes one desperate to discover the exact words that will portray them perfectly on the page.
As such, my greatest desire while here is to explore the beautiful nature of this place, both of the landscape and of the people. I believe that it was by the observation of these things that the pens of so many great Irish writers were inspired, and I can only hope that I might receive even a fraction of such inspiration.