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beginnings of some articles and short stories till a one-line aphorism on page 23 caught my eye: I understood it long before I would have been able to translate it: untranslated, not in German and yet understood, it was even more effective than if it had been rendered into German: The cemeteries , it said, are full of people the world could not do without .
    This wisdom seemed to me to be worth a trip to Dublin, and I made up my mind to lock it securely in my heart for the moments when I would be feeling my importance (later on it seemed to me a kind of key to this strange mixture of passion and equability, to that temperamental weariness, that indifference coupled with fanaticism, which I was to encounter so often).
    Great cool private houses lay hidden behind rhododendrons, behind palm trees and oleander bushes, when I had decided to wake my host despite the barbarically early hour: mountains became visible in the background, long rows of trees.
    Eight hours later a German compatriot was declaring categorically to me: “Everything here is dirty, everything is expensive, and nowhere can you get a proper châteaubriand,” and already I was defending Ireland, although I had only been in the country ten hours, ten hours out of which I had slept for five, bathed for one, spent one in church, argued for one with my compatriot, who could pit six months against my ten hours. I defended Ireland passionately, fought with tea, Tantum ergo , Joyce and Yeats against the châteaubriand, which was particularly dangerous for me since I didn’t know what it was (it was not till long after I got home that I had to look it up to identify it: a kind of steak, it said), I just sensed dimly, asI fought it, that it must be a meat dish—but my struggle was in vain; the man going abroad would like to forego the disadvantages of his native land—all that rushing about at home!—but take his châteaubriand with him; probably one cannot drink tea in Rome with impunity, any more than one can drink coffee in Ireland with impunity, except perhaps in the home of an Italian. I gave up the struggle, drove back in the bus, and marveled at the endless line-ups in front of the movies, of which there seemed to be plenty: in the morning, I thought, they crowd into and around the churches, and in the evening apparently into and around the movies; at a green newsstand I fell victim again to the smile of an Irish girl, bought newspapers, cigarettes, chocolate, then my eye fell on a book lying unnoticed among pamphlets: its white cover, bordered in red, was already soiled; secondhand, I could have it for a shilling, and I bought it. It was Goncharov’s Oblomov , translated into English. Although I knew Oblomov’s home to be some two or three thousand miles farther east, I suspected that he was not out of place in this country, where everyone hates to get up early in the morning.

3
PRAY FOR THE SOUL OF MICHAEL O’NEILL
    At Swift’s tomb my heart had caught a chill, so clean was St. Patrick’s Cathedral, so empty of people and so full of patriotic marble figures, so deep under the cold stone did the desperate Dean seem to lie, Stella beside him: two square brass plates, burnished as if by the hand of a German housewife: the larger one for Swift, the smaller for Stella; I wished I had some thistles, hard, big, long-stemmed, a few clover leaves, and some thornless, gentle blossoms, jasmine perhaps or honeysuckle; that would have been the right thing to offer these two, but my hands were as empty as the church, just as cold and just as clean. Regimental banners hung side by side, half-lowered: did they really smell of gunpowder? They looked as if they did, but the only smell was of mold, as in every church where for centuries no incense has been burned; I felt as though I were being bombarded with needles of ice; I fled, and it was only in the entrance that I saw there was someone in the church after all: the cleaningwoman; she was washing down the porch with