Irish Journal Read Online Free Page A

lye, cleaning what was already clean enough.
    In front of the cathedral stood an Irish beggar, the first I had met: beggars like this one are only to be found otherwise in southern countries, but in the south the sun shines: here, north of the 53 rd parallel, rags and tatters are something different from south of the 30 th parallel; rain falls on poverty, and here even an incorrigible esthete could no longer regard dirt as picturesque; in the slums around St. Patrick’s, squalor still huddles in many a corner, many a house, exactly as Swift must have seen it in 1743.
    Both the beggar’s coatsleeves hung empty at his sides; these coverings for limbs he no longer possessed were dirty; epileptic twitching ran like lightning across his face, and yet his thin, dark face had a beauty that will be noted in a book other than mine. I had to light his cigarette for him and place it between his lips; I had to put money for him in his coat pocket: I almost felt as if I were furnishing a corpse with money. Darkness hung over Dublin: every shade of gray between black and white had found its own little cloud, the sky was covered with a plumage of innumerable grays: not a streak, not a scrap of Irish green; slowly, twitching, the beggar from St. Patrick’s Park crossed over under this sky into the slums.
    In the slums dirt sometimes lies in black flakes on the windowpanes, as if thrown there on purpose, fished up from fireplaces, from canals; but things don’t happen here so easily on purpose, and not much happens by itself: drink happens here, love, prayer, and cursing. God is passionately loved and no doubt equally passionately hated.
    In the dark back yards, the ones Swift’s eyes saw, this dirt has been piled up in decades and centuries: the depressing sediment of time. In the windows of the secondhand shops lay a confused variety of junk, and at last I found one of the objects of my journey: the private drinking booth with the leather curtain; here the drinker locks himself in like a horse; to be alone with whisky and pain, with belief and unbelief, he lowers himself deep below the surface of time, into the caisson ofpassivity, as long as his money lasts; till he is compelled to float up again to the surface of time, to take part somehow in the weary paddling: meaningless, helpless movements, since every vessel is destined to drift toward the dark waters of the Styx. No wonder there is no room in these pubs for women, the busy ones of this earth: here the man is alone with his whisky, far removed from all the activities in which he has been forced to participate, activities known as family, occupation, honor, society; the whisky is bitter, comforting, and somewhere to the west, across three thousand miles of water, and somewhere to the east, two seas to cross to get there—are those who believe in activity and progress. Yes, they exist, such people; how bitter the whisky is, how comforting; the beefy innkeeper passes the next glass into the booth. His eyes are sober, blue: he believes in what those who make him rich do not believe in. In the woodwork of the pub, the paneled walls of the private drinking booth, lurk jokes and curses, hopes and prayers of other people; how many, I wonder?
    Already the caisson—the booth—can be felt sinking deeper and deeper toward the dark bottom of time: past wrecks, past fish, but even down here there is no peace now that the deep-sea divers have invented their instruments. Float up again, then, take a deep breath, and plunge once more into activities, the kind called honor, occupation, family, society, before the caisson is pried open by the deep-sea divers. “How much?” Coins, many coins, thrown into the hard blue eyes of the inn-keeper.
    The sky was still feathered with manifold grays, not a sign of the countless Irish greens, as I made my way to the other church. Not much time had passed: the beggar was standing in the church doorway, and the cigarette I had placed between his lips was