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just being taken out of his mouth by schoolboys, the end nipped off with care so as not to lose a single crumb of tobacco, the butt placed carefully in the beggar’s coat pocket, his cap removed—who, even when he has lost both arms, wouldenter the house of God with his cap on his head?—the door was held open for him, the empty coatsleeves slapped against the doorposts: they were wet and dirty, as if he had dragged them through the gutter, but inside no one is bothered by dirt.
    St. Patrick’s Cathedral had been so empty, so clean, and so beautiful; this church was full of people, full of cheap sentimental decoration, and although it wasn’t exactly dirty it was messy: the way a living room looks in a family where there are a lot of children. Some people—I heard that one was a German who thus spreads the blessings of German culture throughout Ireland—must make a fortune in Ireland with plaster figures, but anger at the maker of this junk pales at the sight of those who pray in front of his products: the more highly colored, the better; the more sentimental, the better: “as lifelike as possible” (watch out, you who are praying, for life is not “lifelike”).
    A dark-haired beauty, defiant-looking as an offended angel, prays before the statue of St. Magdalene; her face has a greenish pallor: her thoughts and prayers are written down in the book which I do not know. Schoolboys with hurling sticks under their arms pray at the Stations of the Cross; tiny oil lamps burn in dark corners in front of the Sacred Heart, the Little Flower, St. Anthony, St. Francis; here religion is savored to the last drop; the beggar sits in the last row, his twitching face turned toward the space where incense clouds still hang.
    New and remarkable achievements of the devotional industry are the neon halo around Mary’s head and the phosphorescent cross in the stoup, glowing rosily in the twilight of the church. Will there be separate entries in the book for those who prayed in front of this trash and those who prayed in Italy in front of Fra Angelico’s frescoes?
    The black-haired beauty with the greenish pallor is still staring at Magdalene, the beggar’s face is still twitching; his whole body is convulsed, the convulsions make the coins in his pocket tinkle softly; the boys with the hurling sticks seem to know the beggar, they seem to understand the twitching of hisface, the low babble: one of them puts his hand into the beggar’s pocket, and on the boy’s grubby palm lie four coins: two pennies, a sixpence, and a threepenny bit. One penny and the threepenny bit remain on the boy’s palm, the rest tinkles into the offering box; here lie the frontiers of mathematics, psychology and political economy, the frontiers of all the more or less exact sciences crisscross each other in the twitching of the beggar’s epileptic face: a foundation too narrow for me to trust myself to it. But the cold from Swift’s tomb still clings to my heart: cleanliness, emptiness, marble figures, regimental banners, and the woman who was cleaning what was clean enough; St. Patrick’s Cathedral was beautiful, this church is ugly, but it is used, and I found on its benches something I found on many Irish church benches: little enamel plaques requesting a prayer: “Pray for the soul of Michael O’Neill, who died 17.1.1933 at the age of sixty. Pray for the soul of Mary Keegan, who died on May 9, 1945, at the age of eighteen”; what a pious, cunning blackmail; the dead come alive again, their date of death is linked in the mind of the one reading the plaque with his own experience that day, that month, that year. With twitching face Hitler was waiting to seize power when sixty-year-old Michael O’Neill died here; when Germany capitulated, eighteen-year-old Mary Keegan was dying. “Pray”—I read—“for Kevin Cassidy, who died 20.12.1930 at the age of thirteen,” and a shock went through me like an electric current, for in December 1930 I had