"This is Happiness"

[fiefoe]

This novel is probably going to be the most Irish book I've read for quite some time. Niall Williams's story of the two 'knights of love' is so festooned with elaborate sentences that I pity whoever that has to translate it into Chinese.

• It came with cold air and curtained light. It came like a judgement, or, in benign version, like a blessing God had forgotten he had left on. It came for a handkerchief of blue sky, came on westerlies, sometimes – why not? – on easterlies, came in clouds that broke their backs on the mountains in Kerry and fell into Clare, making mud the ground and blind the air. It came disguised as hail, as sleet, but never as snow. It came softly sometimes, tenderly sometimes, its spears turned to kisses, in rain that pretended it was not rain, that had come down to be closer to the fields whose green it loved and fostered, until it drowned them.
• I know it seems unlikely that Faha then might have been the place to learn how to live, but in my experience the likely is not in God’s lexicon.
• lonely old houses out the country that are home to rheumatism and damp and the battle of the long afternoons, its doors are shielded by caution and fear of the corrosive nature of nostalgia.
• by the mercy of creation the soonest thing to evaporate in memory is hardship and rain
• Rain: That it had once started was already a fable, as too now would become the stopping. <> The known world was not so circumscribed then nor knowledge equated with facts. Story was a kind of human binding.
• Road: The one outside my grandparents’ house was mud, tramped hard and soft and hard and soft again, it was foot- and wheel- and hoof-made and bowed upwards in its centre like a spine along which pulsed the townland,
• In the fields the cattle, made slow-witted by the rain, lifted their rapt and empty faces, heavy loops of spittle hanging, as though they ate watery light.
• One of the privileges of living in a place forgotten is the preservation of individuality. In Faha, because the centre was distant and largely unknown, eccentric was the norm.
• They were men from out the townlands whose character was made crystalline by solitude. That they were going to attend church was not in doubt, but because of the thorny relation of religion to the masculine they would show no eagerness and shielded off any sense of the spiritual with a studied casualness and a mastery of the essential art of saying nothing.
• People in Faha hadn’t got the hang of parking yet. That Holy Week it was still five years before the introduction of the driving test, and another three before anyone in Faha would attempt to pass it.
• one huddled abashed but no less seedful one of Morrisseys, each born in April nine months after the hay-making and each with something of summer in their natures.
• Some women took the head-covering rule as an invitation to display, most notably Mrs Sexton who had a line in outlandish hats, one creation a kind of exotic wonderland with a hill of artificial flowers that were an Indies atop her, complete with tiny green hummingbird, and required significant mastery of equipoise as she came to the altar-rail.
• What I was like then is hard to capture, the Crowe-ness in me manifest mostly in self-contradiction, my character an uneven construct that swung between flashes of fixedness and rashness, immovability and leap.
• * his first tactic when I told him I was leaving was to say nothing at all. He tented his long fingers and tapped them, like a small church coming asunder and being pressed together.
• It was a common stupidity then to think of your father as unreachable. I did not try to reach him until twenty years later, the year he was dying, and the first time I ever called him by his name.
• But there’s something undoing about the dying light of mid-afternoon. In that empty old house on Marlborough Road all that had stitched me into this life came undone and I couldn’t escape the feeling that folded against my back were wings that had failed to open.
• Ganga had the large ears that God puts on old men as evidence of the humour necessary for creation. Perhaps following the prompting of his physiognomy, he had the philosophy that life was a comedy. Like one of those rubber figures that cannot be toppled, in him this philosophy was irrefutable,
• * There was a world of saints then and people knew the Saints’ Days and whose feast fell when, and from the full gallery they chose favourites. Doady’s missal bulged with all the regulars... as well as a personal selection of Saints of Last Resort.
• shouting down the line the kind of wooden conversation they may one day use on Mars. The telephone had a winder on the side and, like the cartoon bombs in comics, a large battery on the floor with wires coming out of it.
• In her speech were bits of Irish and words that were halfway between two languages, accommodated into the mixture but strange as sloe berries
• They lived by dispute, and as there were often several running concurrently you had to be alert to keep up, to understand that when Doady shouted ‘Water!’ it meant Ganga had let his hands drip instead of turning them in the cloth... But in all Ganga maintained the equilibrium of the just and could not be risen or riled. And in this was the theatre of their marriage, which in Faha was also a spectator sport,
• Half an hour later, once he had gone outside to see to the animals, Doady took the tongs and repositioned all the sods, the way they should be. She said nothing about it, he said nothing about it. The fire survived it all.
• Doady with glasses off, then on, then off again worked by paraffin lamplight with wools and threads of unmatched and often garish colours at elbows, knees, seats and cuffs, every angle of him that needed to be thatched back in against the exuberance of his leaking out.
• Making the Welcome remained a kind of constitutional imperative. My grandparents, like all the old people in Faha then, preserved intact ancient courtesies. The cost of it, the way they would be living in the days after we left, was not hinted at, nor did it once occur to me.
• during the Second World War Ireland fell out of synch with the world. The British, with breathtaking command, introduced something called Double Summertime, putting the clocks two hours forward to enable a longer working day. The Irish did not, and in fact Dublin was, is, and will always be twenty-five minutes and twenty-one seconds behind Greenwich
• Rain in Clare chose intercourse with wind, all kinds, without discrimination, and came any way it could, wantonly.
• when you’re a boy your grandfather’s chest has a peculiar and profound allure, like a spawn pool for salmon, wherein mysteries are resolved.
• * the well (which was not the well you see with stone wall and pulley in English picture books, but a glassy green eye in rushy ground two fields over, which was ‘cleaned’ in summertime by the antique practice of slipping into that eye an eel), and carried back again, slopping until you found that pace, old as time, by which a man or woman walks with water.
• the smell of rain in all its iterations, the smell of distant rain, of being about to rain, of recent rain, of long-ago rain, the insipid smell of drizzle, the sweet one of downpour, the living smell of wool, the dead smell of stone, the metallic ghost stench of mackerel that disobeyed the laws of matter and like Jesus outlived itself by three days.
• It was where you lived by the clock of your stomach, came back to the house only when you were hungry, ate whatever was put before you, and ran out again, only partly aware of the privilege of solitude and the gift of time.
• up on the bog there was turf to be turned – ‘You’re the perfect size for this job’ – lifted and turned and footed again, and again, because with turf the rain defeated all ploys amateur and ingenious to make believe it didn’t exist,
• seventy since public electric lighting was switched on while Charles Stewart Parnell, addressing a large crowd, used the light as a symbol of a free Ireland, Faha still had no electricity.
• you felt blindly for her teat which was a thing unimaginable, large as your boy-hand, pink and coarse and somehow worn too as you coaxed down and not just squeezed out a fierce jet of milk that came hot and greyish and shot alarmingly sideways against the enamel of the bucket with an urgent milk-music.
• You fell brownly asleep and into another dimension where a ragged version of yourself plunged through a world vivid but infirm until you woke to unseen light and a bat asleep upside down just above your bed.
• a man who had probably been slight when young but the world had muscled and beer had bulked him, so although of mid-height he was strong and square and full, but he carried the weight of himself with a look of bemusement, as if it was he who told the world the joke of himself.
• Because this was sixty years ago some details are imagined. Nobody who’s lived an anyway decent amount of life remembers everything.
• * The travellers came out of storytime, you felt, and although some were notorious and some had the guards in plodding pursuit, for the most part they were harmless, understood to be a stray thread stitched into the fabric of the countryside
• Perhaps... because of the mysterious attractiveness of those even tangential to music, he had a long train of rumoured paramours and illicit relations, all of which were in defiance of his actual looks and testament to the unknown depths of females.
• * You live a decent length you get an appreciation for the individuality of creation. You understand there’s no such thing as the common man, and certainly not woman... Everybody carries a world. But certain people change the air about them... had the confidence of the storyteller when the story is still unpacked, its snaps not yet released.
• he’d say, throw the eyebrows and extend towards you an inverted newspaper, folded even as a tablecloth, inside which was what you didn’t yet know about Sputnik, what the Minister for Posts and Telegraphs had promised now, and the news of Manchester United, to which, with the native affinity for tragedy, the sensate half of the country now supported after the Munich crash.
• Time has unpeeled a history of infamy for the country’s institutions, and failures of compassion, tolerance and what was once called common decency were not hard to come upon. Faha was no different;
• I’m at an age now when in the early mornings I’m often revisited by all my own mistakes, stupidities and unintended cruelties. They sit around the edge of the bed and look at me and say nothing. But I see them well enough.
• And because an old man has only the story of his own life I am running across it still, a lanky seventeen-year-old from Dublin, shy and obdurate both, running with a premonition that I thought was doom but was maybe fate if you’re a party to that. I was running believing I was going to save him, when of course it was he who would save me.
• So compelling is the evidence of our own eyes and ears, so swift is your mind to assemble your own version of the story, that one of the hardest things in this world is to understand there’s another way of seeing things.
• We’re all, all the time, striving, and though that means there’s a more-or-less constant supply of failure, it’s not such a terrible thing if you think that we keep on trying. There’s something to consider in that.
• * A key thing to understand about Ganga was that he loved a story. He believed that human beings were inside a story that had no ending because its teller had started it without conceiving of one, and that after ten thousand tales was no nearer to finding the resolution of the last page. Story was the stuff of life, and to realise you were inside one allowed you to sometimes surrender to the plot, to bear a little easier the griefs and sufferings and to enjoy more fully the twists that came along the way.
• This was a country that through the ministry of the Church and other interested parties was encouraged to think of change not only with suspicion but outright fear,
• * when the electricity did finally come, it was discovered that the 100-watt bulb was too bright for Faha. The instant garishness was too shocking. Dust and cobwebs were discovered to have been thickening on every surface since the sixteenth century. Reality was appalling... In the week following the switch-on, Tom Clohessy couldn’t keep mirrors in stock, had a run on hand-, oval-, round- and even full-length as people came in from out the country and bought looking glasses of all variety, went home, and in merciless illumination endured the chastening of all flesh when they saw what they looked like for the first time.
• * Showing a keen understanding of the national character, the Electricity Board had secured a concluding masterstroke. By special arrangement, and the goodness of His Grace the Archbishop, each house that took the electricity would get a free Sacred Heart Lamp.
• When you are born in one century and find yourself walking around in another there’s a certain infirmity to your footing. May we all be so lucky to live long enough to see our time turn to fable.
• ‘The notional is to be made actual,’ he said, and in the instant after, realising his register had gone over the heads of the parishioners, added: ‘The electricity is coming.’
• The doctor kept his foreignness to Faha intact by being punctual, a thing unique in the parish, and establishing the phrase Troy-Time, which meant exact and the opposite of Tom-Time, which meant any time other than when Tom Keane said.
• Irish forests, we had learned in school, were felled to make Lord Nelson’s fleet and were now fathoms deep with the rest of the Admiralty. Instead, after extensive research, which in those days meant sending a man, the Board learned that the best place to purchase the poles was the country of Finland.
• Like all who had to outwit savage climate, Mr Salovarra eschewed sentiment and offered an inflated price of £4 a pole... Right here is the only one, said Mr Salovarra and smiled. He had the kind of teeth that suggested the tearing of fish-flesh.
• In the deep woods was a preternatural silence and a sense of the beginnings of time, and Mangan was not surprised to learn of the Finnish epic poetry of the Kalewala in which the earth is created from pieces of duck egg
• sometime you could do worse than go out into the country, find one of those quiet roads where time is dissolved by rain, look out across ghost fields that were once farmed and you’ll still see some of those poles An tUasal Mangan first laid a frozen hand on in the forests of Finland.
• it’s human nature to dream, and in the vexed nature of marriage to hope time will harmonise the irreconcilable.
• He looked blankly at his audience, air leaking out of his performance, then some switch inside his memory was thrown, he blinked twice, tapped his forefinger on the table, and added: ‘Of course, there can be trouble with the insulators for the HT and the LT fuses too.’
• The rain having departed, the evening sky was million-flecked. It felt opened, as though previous ones you just now realised had been closed. Because there was no electric light, because we were at one of the edges of the universe, and because they were usually shielded with an impenetrable cloud, the stars hung with naked wonder.
• interest in others perhaps the first of the many things extinguished by alcohol / There are better smiles on deflated footballs.
• (all places had their own propriety, and Craven’s was that it was a place of despair, it was where there was no further to fall, where you could hunker down and linger in the dark
• It wasn’t only that this didn’t happen in Craven’s, it was that there was something raw in it, something deeply felt, that was, even to those who had descended blinking into the umbrae and penumbrae of numberless bottles of stout, immediately apparent and made those who first looked now look away. <>Christy sang. I cannot tell you how startling it was. If you believe in a soul, as I do, then my soul stirred.
• * It seems to me the quality that makes any book, music, painting worthwhile is life, just that. Books, music, painting are not life, can never be as full, rich, complex, surprising or beautiful, but the best of them can catch an echo of that, can turn you back to look out the window, go out the door aware that you’ve been enriched, that you have been in the company of something alive that has caused you to realise once again how astonishing life is... that illumination, which feels I’m going to say holy, by which I mean human raptness... It felt like an intimacy you weren’t entitled to, but knew it privileged you
• drunk: The stars slid down the velvet sky. You could put them back in place by locking them in your gaze and lifting your head slowly, slowly up. Stay, stars.
• It is a freeing thing to flow into the dark. Now that I am entering my Fourth Age, the Age of Completion they call it, I think of that cycle ride and take courage from it. We could barely see the road we raced down. We came round the bend at Furey’s and past Considine’s discovering that blind cycling is its own art and into each instant compresses the knowledge of how to master it.
• flew glorious for one long and sublime instant before landing face-first in the cold puddle and muck of reality. <> 11. By the grace of new chapters, it was morning.
• Thatch has the density of a fairytale forest... The roof is minutely alive and feels forgiving, as though it has lifted like an eyebrow towards the sky with surprise and welcomes back the all-but-forgotten.
• * I cannot be sure what I heard that night, what I heard later and added to the fog-memory, and what invented, a perplex that deepens after sixty years, but with less consequence. The truth turns into a story when it grows old. We all become stories in the end. So, though the narrative was flawed, the sense was of a life so lived it was epic.
• And so, it was only gradually, over the days to come, when they lifted their eyes and saw the improbable plane of blue overhead, that people began to acknowledge to themselves that up to now they had been living under a fall of watery pitchforks. <> At that time, there endured in Faha an antique belief common in all rainy places, that sunlight was curative.
• let escape brown flights of moths whose larvae dated to the days of Parnell and who now transitioned to powder in mid-air. I saw them but did not remember for fifty years until I saw a figure pixelate on a screen. The moths of Easter, I said aloud, and they flew in memory and dissolved again the way the smallest things of your life do... Set outside, big-jointed furniture creaked an asymptotic series of aches that soon went unremarked because it was understood to be the bone-music of resurrection.
• he had told the crews the best way to solve any disputes was shame... Second, there was the question of unworthiness. This had been ingrained by the Church from birth. With recourse to a pure Aristotelian logic, the bishops understood that making people feel lesser was a way of making the Almighty mightier, and with native extremism Faha took that to new lows.
• * There was one of those mild breezes that in April can seem eloquent. What I remember are the birds, sudden quickened flights of them, ten, twenty taking flight together, with a magician’s flourish, leaving bare one tree and finding another. <> From a lifetime, how do you recall such a thing? The truth is you don’t exactly. But you think you do, and you might have. At this stage that’s good enough. Main point is, it seems to me every life has a few gleaming times, times when things were brighter, more intense and urgent, had more life in them I suppose.
• He had the wan face of a farmer in calving season, eyes small from lack of sleep and close encounters with viscera.
• A mirror of what confession was for the soul, surfaces had to be made spotless. I’m probably not the only one who, going from house to house and witnessing this, would have thought: what soaps and abrasives it might take to launder my spirit.
• Women enjoy watching men work, the same way men enjoy watching women dance. There’s otherness and mystery in it.
• Blackall’s. The one-time land agent’s house, it was infamous in the parish, its history leaving a stain that had endured the way it might at a plague site despite the passing of a hundred years and the balm of generation.
• He lifted the teacup and performed an impeccable demonstration of how you deny reality.
• Savouring the turn in the story, she said no more. She looked above us into the immensity of the firmament. ‘And,’ she said again, forefingering the bridge of her glasses and with the unbounded theatrics of all the O Siochrus milking all the udders of the pause... She lowered her voice. ‘Didn’t Sullivan the undertaker find the host after, stuck to the roof of her mouth.’... The conundrum landed, we were silently all Sullivan then, trying to decide which way to send the host.
• There was every reason to feel natural joy in the world, but for the one that makes it accessible. When your spirit is uneasy, stillness can be a kind of suffering. And when you’re young, the unlived life in you, all that future, urgent and unreachable, can be unbearable.
• When you’ve been raised inside a religion, it’s not a small thing to step outside it. Even if you no longer believe in it, you can feel its absence. There’s a spirit-wound to a Sunday. You can patch it, but it’s there,
• You were inside the engine of Easter. With the enduring magic by which a people, on budgets thin as air, not only survive but celebrate, the feast was everywhere being readied.
• She knew who was in which grave, and who in the one below that one (and the ones below those too, who were working their way back to the surface through the self-raising agent of a colloquy of worms fat and contented from passing through life, until chosen by Simon of the Kellys as best bait for the smirking salmon passing in the river).
• Mrs Moore landed... Flo, the world’s saddest feather duster... She held the record for ash-balancing. She would work with a burning cigarette held out ballerina-style in one hand, a tower of ash she didn’t need to look at building nicely while she dusted, or performed a slow-motion version of same, the dust in no danger, until the tower was certain to fall, and at the last moment, as though it were a smoking extension of herself, she would bring the cigarette to her small mouth and suck like the damned. She would draw on the cigarette and the smoke-coloured dashes of her eyebrows would float up and leave no doubt that from ashes to ashes was her destiny, and not such a bad one at that.
• Mrs Moore was my grandfather’s surprise and understood that she was the least likely emissary of love, his way of acknowledging to Doady that he knew she was afflicted, and company would be a balm. Knowing that Doady would refuse any such, he had presented it as charity. Knowing that Mrs Moore would not accept charity, he had presented it to her as an act of kindness to his wife.
• * One of the things about Irish music is how one tune can enter another. You can begin with one reel, and with no clear intention of where you will be going after that, but halfway through it will sort of call up the next so that one reel becomes another and another after that, and unlike the clear-edged definitions of songs, the music keeps linking, making this sound-map even as it travels it, so player and listener are taken away and time and space are defeated. You’re in an elsewhere. .. Which, I suppose, is both my method and aim in telling this story too.
• It was inexplicably tender, the slightly abashed boyishness of a big man in his sixties. <> ‘For her I once ate a dozen purple tulips,’ Christy said, and in the blueness of his eyes you could see he was amazed by and not a little admiring of his younger self, who entered the garden on that statement and strode through, all innocence and earnestness, a wildly impetuous boy with small boots, glitter eyes and tufted hair, in love with Annie Mooney... Maybe you’ve seen that sometime sitting with an older person, the youth they were passes through their eyes, and is in silence acknowledged, hopefully acquitted.
• Softly whistling all the while, he held in both hands the bulk of his belly and tried in vain to push it inside him. When this failed, by pressing from the top he tried to send it south below his beltline. He pulled up the underpants to try and arrange a meeting. Abandoning this, he sucked in his breath and stood to his full height and with both hands again pressed his belly in and upward, as if its rightful place was in his chest cavity. It remained there for five seconds, and for five seconds he was delighted at the figure he cut, the vanquishing of time, gravity and human sinkage.
• ‘How long is it since you saw her?’
  ‘In the flesh? Near enough fifty years.’
  I nearly laughed.
  ‘But in every other way, some time every day since.’
  And that stopped me. That was one of the things about him. He walked this line between the comic and the poignant, between the certainly doomed and the hopelessly hopeful. In time I came to think it the common ground of all humanity.
• no one then spoke of their ailments, there was a now depreciated philosophy of offering it up and half the people of Faha were dead before they thought to complain of a pain.
• ‘Well, I can’t help. I’m not going to church. I don’t believe in God.’ <> ‘Sshhh.’ He patted down the thought with both hands like it was a small fire.
• I was now aware that he had orchestrated everything, the job with the electrics, coming to Clare, to Faha, and to Doady and Ganga’s, so as to be at the altar-rails of St Cecelia’s on Easter Sunday to see Annie Mooney.
• * With a slightly lesser view of humanity but an undiminished zeal, Mrs Queally unearthed a cousin of a cousin of her husband’s who worked in the Buttermarket in Limerick, took the bone-shaker two hours to the city, from the personal abundance set aside for the Bishop’s Palace purloined a portion, and came back on the bus with an archangel’s look of victory, the front four seats bedecked with lilies.
• Eyes straight ahead, the women prayed that kind of timeless praying that rises murmurous and general the way you imagine the land might pray, dangles of rosary beads moving through fingers like some circular riverworks of soul.
• The Latin rose and hung above the candled altar like air carvings, intricate and ornamental, and other, which was how God was supposed to be at the time.
• In profile her face had a graven look, but also something of what, I would only come to understand years later, time did to great beauty, refine it, as though after coming through a fire.
• To Ganga and Doady, Easter was an inarguable actuality same as the rain or the river, and with as little call for debate. I wasn’t wise enough to envy them then.
• Doady did a small genuflect with her face. ‘Welcome, Mother.’
• It is a dolorous fact that a meal, months in the dreaming, weeks in the planning and days in the preparation, is eaten in minutes.
• Ganga, whose habit was to open his trouser belt after eating, made it halfway before he caught Doady’s glare and turned the unbuckling into a patting.
• After a liquid lunch in Craven’s, he had found the margins of the roads badly drawn.
• A small thing will feed a lover, and the thought that Annie Mooney had recognised him in the church that morning was enough to keep Christy’s heart high and his eyes glossed.
• Without specific destination, but the knowledge that the heartland of the music was north of Kilmihil and south of Miltown, we pushed the bicycles out of Faha along roads hard and curved like bones in the moonlight.
• As though an infinite store had been discovered, more and more stars kept appearing. The sky grew immense. Although you couldn’t see it, you could smell the sea.
• It was a given then that with musicians in Clare it was difficult to start them, to stop them impossible.
• They had no apparent inclination to take the instrument cases out of where they were stacked in the windowsill, until they did. And when they did, the air was changed. There’s no other way to say it. The smoky, dark corner of a dingy pub forgot that it was a nowhere. It became a locus, a centre, and we became a company, focused around tables where, behind abandoned butts smoking in ashtrays and pint glasses paused in mid-tide, two fiddles, a flute and a concertina made time stretch so it was now and back across the ages in the same moment.
• the sliding slope of Church Street like a crooked yawn, the misaligned huddle of the shops and houses curved into a comma, paused beneath a sky now both opal and pink, the picture of actual earthly peace, or as near as. <> Christy sang the song up to the front windows of Gaffney’s chemist shop. I stood a little ways behind, like one holding the horses... With screwed-up eyes and throat-cords bulging, with bubbling porter-sweat and cuckoo-spittle, he was singing her into being and, by the power of an antique passion, porter and the potency of an old song, seeing her too. Whether the Annie Mooney of years earlier or the one in St Cecelia’s that morning, I couldn’t have said.
• * because of what would become a lifelong weakness for fine words and minor chords, I think I believed not only would calamity pass but the tactic would prove ingenious... To the serenade, Nolan’s dog was not a convert... in the case of Faha was augmented by Clancy’s cock, Hayes’s hens, and then, wait, Healy’s ass in the half-acre behind the hardware shop. In truth nothing in creation could be declared a fan, and, though the singing was neither drunken nor loutish, soon enough a rough chorus was barking and braying and the village was started from sleep with the forked hair and quizzical eyes of the burgled.
• I realised that unlike those of us whose hope only came in one size, slim, Christy’s was still broad enough to survive the failure of his first approach... leaving behind us the operatic scene, the singing of the love-song, and a story that I’m assured is still told, embroidered into fable, sixty years later.
• In an effort to elevate the status of the game and replicate the wireless commentaries on Radio Éireann, Thomas Nally employed a bullhorn and ran up and down the sideline broadcasting a pro-Fahaean version of what was happening. Not to be outdone in the battle for reality, Boola had a Brophy with a bullhorn who did likewise, running up and down the same sideline
• Once standing, any decent story has a life of its own and can run whichever way it wants. So the details that Doady came home with, Christy’s calling out Annie’s name, his beating the chemist’s door with his fist and crying against the glass, like a child with a runny nose it may have picked up anywhere.
• reasons for haste were harder to find, and the need to meet a deadline was understood to be an invention of convenience.
• as though playing a close-to-the-chest card game against an opponent deep and devious and invisible, people like Maureen Tohill and Timmy Hayes gave out a contrarian view, It won’t keep up, and We’ll be paying for this yet, bluffing the Almighty to show his hand and keep the sun shining just to spite them.
• And because old men no longer need adhere to the convention of time, and because memory dissolves it, I can be there still. I can be sat on the grass at our lesser picnic on the top of Master Quinn’s field and feel the sun striking down and know something of the peace of that pause, the dawning that opens in a person, which is not yet at the point of understanding, not yet anything solid or sure as a thought, but happens in a way that you may not realise until years later and miles away when it comes to you that just then, just there, you were brushed with nothing less than eternity, catching a sense of a place that has been before you and will be after you, and both were contained in that moment. In the mid-distance birds landing and lifting that were the same birds since forever and would be forever, and you in that forever too, sitting on the dry grass of a hill field in Faha aware that your whole life is an instant
• * The thing about Doady’s brownbread is when you take a bite of it you’ve taken a bite out of the elements, earth, air, fire and water all, and while your mouth negotiates with the grainy dryness now made a ball by the moisture of the butter, while you realise that by an alchemy of bakery the lump of the bread in your mouth is bigger than it seemed in your hand,... while you’re eating Doady’s brownbread, keep chewing, you’re gagged by the essential stuff of substance, that insists on its own primacy, that, like life itself, is partways laughing at you and partways saying Take me seriously, because otherwise it may just choke you. 
• I hadn’t lived long enough to know there’s an infinity of ways to tell the same story, that human failure is a history without end, but so too human endeavour, and that between both lies the lot of the living.
• the rearing of twelve contrary children had taught them to live by swallowing the stomach acid of first reaction,
• That human beings loved truly only once was an unwritten tenet when the world was young, an idea fostered by the Church, supported by the coming knowledge of heart trauma, and by the bookstall of Spellissey’s where all the second-hand paperbacks told of First Loves.  Second loves had small l’s, they existed, but were in the lexicon of male weakness
• Without it ever clarifying itself in the front of his mind, without recourse to considerations of commerce or weighing the reasons for and against, but maybe following the deeper rationale of unreason that rain would always remind him of his wedding, in his case rain and love being inextricable, he finished his tea, looked out at the gleamy water rivering down the crooked smile of Church Street, and thought: We can do good here.
• I’m not alone I suppose in sometimes thinking a thing I’ve imagined happened. I may be alone in thinking that doesn’t matter.
• But in all western parishes the temporary was unhinged from the temporal by the fact that it was the term used by Government to account for the short-term, slapdash, second- and third-rate solutions that were applied to bad roads, school buildings, hospitals, and the like. The people lived in the permanently temporary.
• begin the rough negotiation we all have to make with failure, blame and loss, / because I loved you once is among the saddest lines in humanity.
• The sad truth is that, like fish, the looks of the Irish are not improved by sunshine,
• After the same ten days the parish was already stippled with electricity poles. It was remarkable to look across fields where nothing had changed in a thousand years and see the stuck-up fingers, not yet wired or connected to anything, and not unlike the totems of a tribe landed from elsewhere and claiming territories by lines invisible and arbitrary.
• I regret the scorn. It’s an acid vice of the high-minded.
• as the shaft of timber sank into the hole and then began to rise like a giant’s needle into the sun. It was wonderful. I felt a surge of joy, the simple, original and absolute thrill of a physical victory over the ardours of the terrain,
• Instead, suffering a heroic disorder, that was part not wanting to leave the only moment in my life so far when I was at one with other men, when the profound loneliness I lived in had been assuaged by the communal, and part unwilling to be the one letting down the side, I leaned in to the pole, believing for one blissed-out breath that I could defeat gravity and hold it upright myself.
• The hotel responded with a diva’s tactic of theatrically falling apart.
• In Faha, turf was burned, and perhaps because turf recalled its more glorious past as forest, and resented its fall to a fuel somewhere just above cow dung, or because in Faha dry turf was never actually dry, it burned poorly and every house smelled of turf until no one could smell it any more. Woodsmoke was the smell of money, of big houses and the gentry.
• Meeting Sophie: You might think that in sixty-odd years I’d forget, lose the memory in my blood and in my bones of what that felt like, that the feeling would be lost, and my only recourse to invent a second-hand version or erase it altogether from the story. But you’d be wrong. Sometimes a moment pierces so perfectly the shields of our everyday it becomes part of you and enjoys the privilege of being immemorial... I remember the canal of my throat closing, I remember riots breaking out, sea in my ears, sweat on my lip, fish-hooks floating in my eyes, and the reflex that was general and immediate, crawling beneath my skin and birthing in me the archetypal response to great beauty: the overwhelming sense of my own ugliness.
• For the first time in my life I am stopped in the thousand sensations, in the intoxicating strangeness of another person.
• the river running with silver mockeries of moon.
• * my grandfather’s way of telling a story was to go pell-mell, throwing Aristotle’s unities of action, place and time into the air and in a tumult let the details tumble down the stairs of his brain and out his mouth. He had grown up in an age when storytelling was founded on the forthright principles of passing the time and dissolving the hours of dark. In Faha’s case, this was a dark permanently tattooed with a rain that insisted on its own reality, trying to get into the house any way it could,... My point, the story had to compete with an emphatic actuality, and defeat it by an air-construct of the imagination, adhering to the Virgilian principle that if you can take the mind, the body will follow.  To conquer both time and reality then, one of the unwritten tenets of the local poetics was that a story must never arrive at the point, or risk conclusion. And because in Faha, like in all country places, time was the only thing people could afford,
• * Ganga, like me I suppose, chose the baroque, first because of the native precept to enjoy the music of telling, second, because English was a stolen language, and third, because the baroque offered a truer reflection of life as lived in Faha.
• What followed in tumultuous fashion, a single sentence, quick-spoke and eye-popping and miraculous, bypassing both the principles of pauses and the mechanics of breath, my grandfather going for it, and in telling his side of what happened building a tower of description that was in constant danger of toppling over as more and more clauses were thrown on to it, adjectives and adverbs, bounteous, haltingly, found in pockets and pitched on, similes not spared, prepositions dangling and otherwise, metaphors throw them on there, in a telling urgent and excited
• and yet, and yet still again, because you couldn’t deny it, because, if anything was, it was a fundament, it was in the first intention, part of the first motion when the first key was wound and the whole clockwork of man and woman was first set going, love was where everyone was trying to get to.
• the first thing I thought of was Sophie Troy. (To say thought is a lie, it supposes a vacancy and then a conscious act, but she was there before I was aware of the words to think or say she was. To say thought suggests a singular act, I thought of her, but the truth was she was universal not singular, that is, she was all my thoughts and at the same time, so that they were not separate, not measured or measurable, not individual like memories... I knew I was in a state, if not to actually love, then certainly to give myself to that for which my temperament and education had prepared me, which is, to adore.
• Though I would like to prove the authenticity of my person and the originality of my heart by saying here that no, for me it was different, the truth is we all sometime confirm the durability of clichés. So yes, the grass did seem to have greened overnight,
• Beneath his hat Rushe’s face was crunched together, as though hastily assembled. He had the small mouth of a smaller man or one who distrusted words.
• * It’s hard not to despise officialdom in all forms. The retreat of human beings behind it diminishes the nature of what we are. I’ve never known a man or woman to be better for the wearing of the uniform... that afternoon when Rushe appeared in my grandparents’ house he brought with him more than his person. In his manner and im-person, he brought the State, and in doing so, in his standing there, squat, rigid and bull-headed, in his use of a tone and language hitherto unknown inside the stone walls of that crooked house, an easier and more natural way of living was nearing its end.
• ‘Out of a sense of goodness.’ <> A parcel of silence landed between us then. It was as though I had opened a box from which a white dove had risen and flew now about the kitchen, the sense of goodness being just as outlandish.
• He nodded towards where the river we knew was there was not there now. ‘That’s all.’ <> It was like something had fallen from the sky. It plummeted down and landed thump on the ground in front of us, feathers, bones in a twist, neck awry and blood from the beak.
• Because I was incapable of inventing a unique behaviour, or the world had used up all its originality, with a sugared irresistibility, all the clichés of lovelorn behaviour stuck to me. I didn’t mind. There’s honour in the ghost-company of the unrequited.
• It was a true thing that all incidents in the parish then had an afterlife and were tirelessly reanimated with an interpretative emphasis or edit. It was one of the threads that tied community and whether or not you had heard the story already didn’t matter, you listened to this version and nodded and said, ‘I know,’ and let that knowledge be a comfort between you for a time.
• Keeping his eyes on the floor, he shook his head slowly and said, ‘If only Napoleon had invaded.’ It was a starter for which there was no finisher, but for the occasional muffled artillery of his gas... Mary Bruff, who never went anywhere without her cough, let it off now,
• * everything from alliteration, allusion, amplification, analogy and anaphora (‘If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh?’ I could recite every speech of Shylock’s once. God bless the day) to metonyms and metaphors, oxymorons and similes. After Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres, the next thing you learned in Latin was non solo sed etiam. What I’m saying is, it was foundational, and admired, the bit of flourish. <> On Moylan went, letting fly with antanagoge (‘This heater is not as beautiful as your fire, but it puts out more kilowatts’), enumeratio (‘The motor, the pump and the drum, all the very latest’) and epizeuxis (‘Power, power, power’).
• intelligence in its ferocity a gift and a burden, something difficult to handle and extraordinarily sharp, like a sword in the soft tissue of the mind. In general, better not to be too intelligent, was Faha’s philosophy,
• ‘The hardship of your lives is over.’ <> It was a breathtaking sentence and the summit took a moment to take it in... The idea was too enormous, or the reality of experience too sharp to be digested. It was as if the hardship of their lives had been summoned, had come in the open front door, a history of cold and rain, of muck and puddle, dark, disappointment and struggle and disappointment again, and was face-to-face now with an army of gleaming white metal. As always when confronted with compelling fantasy, nobody knew what to say.
• Like others there, I think my grandmother may have been chastened by a feeling the machines were looking at her, and her life, with cold judgement. I couldn’t help thinking of that moment when Pip looks at his boots and realises how crude they are.
• Now, I didn’t draw the corollary then that the failure of his fifty-year love had provoked the birth of mine. I didn’t realise any connection,
• now I was at the rails where, a little further along to the right, the three Troy sisters were kneeling and waiting, God forgive me, to put out their tongues.
• Father Coffey..., gave the lie to his youth and inexperience and transcended the rigidity of the Church by doing the most remarkable thing. Understanding that I would not open my mouth, the host he had chosen for me he brought towards my closed lips and, when it was near enough to touch, in a fluid arc, as if nearness was enough, he brought it back and laid it in the ciborium and moved on to Geraldine O. So simple, graced and generous a gesture was it that not a single person in St Cecelia’s noticed. It was as though by mime I had received.
• Doady look askance at her life and circumstance and release a host of hooped taupe mealworms into her belief in the pre-eminence of the home-made. She was not alone in this, a flaw in our nature makes the glamour of the new irresistible.
• I understood that I had been wrong about Christy. I had come to believe his character irrepressible. I had thought of him as a force, with sureness of purpose, but, in doing so, I had robbed him of human dimension.
• Christy looked away from me, broke open the cup of his hands, lowered them. He rocked slightly, rocking on the spike of the question so it went deeper all the time. There was suffering in it, I knew that, and was realising that when you’re seventeen the suffering of a man in his sixties can seem monumental, and till that moment you thought soul-torment the territory of the young
• ‘You will go see her tomorrow,’ he said. <> I invented a braver self and said, ‘I will.’... And because in our minds we could imagine ourselves knights of first and last loves, and because of the overpowering need for something to be done, I announced, ‘Tonight we are going to hear Junior Crehan.’
• We followed the recipe for comedy that is two men on one bicycle, starting off with me on the bar, switching to Christy on the bar and sparing my wrists by his operating the handlebars, attempting a third variant with me up front like a giraffe transport sitting on the handlebars, before we accepted defeat and walked the bicycle like an indulged idiot companion
• the nights she’d come to see him walk out on the stage, not missing a single performance he ever gave, were garlanded luminous vindication of her decision to say Yes, yes I will, feeling but not noting aloud the perplexed truth that by playing another he became the best version of himself
• * in time the parish coming not only to expect but want the tragic tone of Mick Madigan, taking a dark joy from the truth of it and the fact that for some the world is without light. <> I saw Mick play maybe three times but have thought of him more than that. I note this here by way of excusing my own character at that age. It took me many years to conceive of life as comedy, or tragicomedy anyway. The part I was playing always seemed grave and earnest. I always felt there was something I must do.
• Doctor Troy... clocked me with a look in which was translated his experience of every kind of human folly, a look which read instantly the nature of my vigil and in which there was not a little salt of derision.
• If I couldn’t do anything yet about Sophie Troy I could about Annie Mooney. <> Now, as far as I was concerned there are two ways of living, and because we’re on a ball in space these were more or less exactly poles apart. The first, accept the world as it is... The second, that acceptance is surrender, that there’s a place for it but that place is somewhere just before your last breath... This was more or less the philosophy of Tess Grogan, who, well into her nineties, kept the finest garden in Faha. We lost a garden, she’d say, speaking of the time of Adam like it wasn’t so long ago... ‘We lost a garden, our whole lives we have to remake it.’
• her eyes the same sorrowfulness that some call wisdom / I found myself in the footless place between story and truth.
• the vexing truth that all men are impossible sentimentalists, who invented a religion of forgiveness and grace in the full knowledge of their own waywardness, all sorts, who sought forever the consolation of clemency and the embrace of their mothers.
• * When you try and lift your mother it’s not the same as lifting another human being. The moment you do it you know you’ll never forget it for the rest of your life. You know there’s no frailty, nakedness, nor tenderness either, quite like this, and know that the moment you have her in your arms the feeling of it is entering you so profoundly that from here on it will form part of the knowledge of your blood and brain and soul too, whether you believe in souls or not.
• The line of wire caught your eye, not only because your eye hadn’t attuned to seeing lines but because these were the first drawn by man on the air over that landscape, and spoke, in some part unsettlingly, of the dominion of science over nature and the reality of future times.
• * It was a condensed explanation, but I came to understand him to mean you could stop at, not all, but most of the moments of your life, stop for one heartbeat and, no matter what the state of your head or heart, say This is happiness, because of the simple truth that you were alive to say it. <> I think of that often. We can all pause right here, raise our heads, take a breath and accept that This is happiness, and the bulky blue figure of Christy cycling across the next life would be waving a big slow hand in the air at all of us coming along behind him.
• there was a piper in the corner, pipers then rare as hens’ teeth, and he played a plaintive music that was like the salt wind singing, utterly strange and familiar, unlike any other music really, an absolute music, uncompromising as a blackthorn, ancient and elemental, and in the air he played was a whole history of the troubled heart, and when I looked at Christy I saw the sorrow in his happiness had made shine his eyes.
• The apprentice lover has to make it up as he or she goes along, they think no one has ever felt like this before. Others have loved, yes, but not like this is textbook. We all feel we are originals, maybe at the moment when we are most universal.
• That was his religion, as he was each minute inventing it.
  All he needed was to see her.
  From this distance, when you get past the hopelessness of him, there’s something hopeful in that. In the cure of another.
• It didn’t matter either that there was little talk between them – The German worked in a studied quiet – because by the time he was going home in the dark after, Ganga felt that more than the bicycle was repaired. <> The trouble was, for the companionship to continue, my grandfather had to keep breaking the bicycle.
• so, while to throw yourself off the top of a steep timber stairs requires a fair bit of negotiation, and I suppose some courage, the courage is based on a fiction. He doesn’t know how much it will hurt. Not really.
• In many versions, all of life is a fall from grace. In this one, I’m hoping to go the other way. I’m working on life as a rise to grace, after a fall. After several falls, in fact.
• She tilted back her face as though it were an offering, brought the cigarette like an adorer to her lips and sucked a pucker smoke out of it at an angle of eleven o’clock.
• who Charlie was was an April sun-shower, a quick and impetuous dazzlement, an untrappable tempered loveliness combined with a liveliness of mind that in those times the gentry called winning. <> I’m aware I’m speaking across the years here. But Charlie Troy was, well, a goddess.
• * By the time I was turning in my grandparents’ gate I had found linear the corkscrew logic that by calling at the house and taking her sister to the pictures on Friday I would be proving my love for Sophie.
• (banking scion) where soon after he’d start developing the soft, round bottom of a man who sat on money for a living. For his twenty-first birthday Eugene had been given a new set of teeth top and bottom. It was the done thing then among a certain class, and that was the one he was in, so the teeth were out, and he was out of kissing commission until the gums healed and he could say ‘Charlie’ without spraying.
• I am an awkward and unnatural bird in neck-crane with lips pursed, as though succumbing to some elemental suction by which human beings are to be stuck together, laughably, by the lips, crossing the no-distance that is also enormous,
• * Charlie’s kisses, were, I suppose, in The Book of Kisses. But they’d be in the chapter called Devouring. There was biting and gnawing and teeth-banging in them, an urgent air of mouth-to-mouth combat, wild and violent and driving to an end that was out of reach... She pulled me against her in a mime of movie stars, but the three-dimensionality of our bodies made a bumping mockery of blending, elbows and knees proving extra to the parts required and noses on standby with an abashed air of being in the way... even as your wrists were singing, the egg on your forehead breaking, and your eyes agape from the out-of-this-world experience of your face eaten by a swan.
• what she wanted now was to feel the flesh of my chest, only to discover Christy’s shirt had no buttons, pulling it up, and pulling it up, choking me on the last-line-defence of my scapulas, and pulling it some more, half undressing a surrendered parachute-musketeer
• But, with a bewildering contrariness, the intimacies of the Mars were between us and too vertiginous to cross. I was too removed from myself to know what I was feeling, but wonder was part of it and fizzing in me along a cable of pleasure fairly thickly embraided with guilt and betrayal.
• was soon shaking in his chest, his happiness for me like small white feathers of down in the dark, going everywhere.
• not unusual for these shelves, which had to be improvised at short order, to be uncarpentered constructs variously and ingeniously propped, tied, glued and hanging off stone walls whose last dignity was to refuse to be screwed.


• Sophie opened the door. <> All of me knelt down. All of me bowed. Inside the chapel of myself, all my candles lit.
• There was no time to consider it, I was face-to-face with an America of teeth, coast-to-coast and sea-to-shining-sea, whose immediate effect was to make you keep your mouth closed on your own peninsular coastline.
• * an agreement between Ronnie and me to declare regulation standard a net with an irredeemable bow in the centre, I walked down the avenue in a suffused evening sunlight, knowing that two things were now certain. I would never again set foot inside the Mars. And my doom was complete, I was in love with the three Troy sisters.
• the soft permissive comfort in the sound May. Say it and you sound the evening coming down over Faha and the fields about, the cattle standing in them and the river behind the street wearing the navy sky like a favoured scarf. May. A sound that comes around you. A sound that has your mother in it.
• There was a day when my father and I brought her down the stairs between us to take her to a specialist in town. Her body felt disassembled.
• An unsaid understanding, born out of being in the company of suffering, meant the three of us, doctor, priest and me, were in a conspiracy of silence.
• about myself, which last made dawn on me that it’s only when someone asks you about yourself that you exist in the fourth dimension of a story. In none of this do I wish to pretend that I was any more assistance to her than anyone else might have been.
• * What happened next, I didn’t make happen. By no means direct or indirect did I suggest it. I was resolved to my station of visitor, house-caller, tea and toast maker, press emptier, and took a jigsaw solace in fitting in in that small way.
• Annie Mooney’s first proper conversation with Christy in fifty years began with a blunt declaration: I don’t want to speak about me. She wanted no acknowledgement of her illness. What she asked instead was for him to pick up the thread where their lives came apart and tell her where he went the day of their wedding.
  His first words to her were the ones he had been holding in the barrel of his chest for so long they came out in a brine of sorrow:
  ‘Please forgive me.’
• Some stories are too good not to be told, was an alibi in Faha. She told it to her sister in Dublin, judging near three hundred miles a safe distance to let the cat out of the bag, but misjudging the legs of a story which started its return journey that same evening when her sister told a friend visiting from the story-bog of the Bog of Allen, Mrs Prendergast not only misjudging the cunning of the cat but the fleas of invention it would pick up along the way back. When, two weeks later, Mary O Donahue leaned into the counter to tell Mrs Prendergast in loud whispers what you wouldn’t believe about that electric man above in Crowe’s – Christy had been in prison in Mexico, he had seen the alligators sunning themselves on sandy banks
• When at last Christy hung up and emerged out the front door, he had the unshelled shyness of all who’ve encountered the naked heart.
• I knew she knew that I knew, and so on, but we put that knowledge back on the tree and made like the innocent.
• This time he didn’t have to say This is Christy and she didn’t have to say I don’t want to talk about myself because he already knew the way ahead, which was the way of the storyteller, and, as though all day he had kept his finger in the pages, he was able to resume where he had left off when the previous night she had interrupted his account of himself
• * he had already surmised that the way to prolong their reconnection was to invest the telling with vivid details, some of which, when he went to reach for them in memory, were not there, and he had to resort to a politician’s ploy of inventing the truth on the spot. As though under the influence of our cycling sojourns along corkscrew bends and crooked boreens, he let the story go down side roads, diversions of no fixed purpose other than the contrary one of going a different way, and soon found he could talk for half an hour and be only a half an hour further along the tale of his life.
• ‘And then I went to Morocco,’ Christy said, not missing the beat, and picking up from where he had left off, in the same way one tune bled into another in seisiúns and formed one continuous music, or, as he would become in the fable of this time, the Fahaean Scheherazade.
• What Doady knew, without saying a word, was that, within the one-foot-after-the-other confines of that tightrope, they were free. <> That she didn’t bring up the question of the electricity with my grandfather was an act of love, and marriage.
• Doady had had to invent a behaviour for a visitor who wouldn’t take tea. It was plumping unplump cushions
• what it had felt to be in those places again where there was the strange human pleasure in painful memory.
• The trinity of Sophie and Charlie and Ronnie was there, each in their own variant of magnificence. They each held my hand lightly a moment and were gone, as was true of their place in my life.
• He sang as he had before, shut-eyed, head back and arms down. He sang the same song he had sung outside her window in the night. He sang it as if no one was listening but her. And all of Faha felt the same. In the face of the raw feeling, through a perfect stillness people made themselves invisible. Christy sang all the verses. He sang as though he was sending the song after her, as though the air and words of it could escape the confines of time and space and soon enough reach the next place where she was gone.
• * But possibly that didn’t happen. As I think I’ve said, there are some memories you can’t lean on. You sense the railings of them but you don’t reach out a hand.
• Junior Crehan: He was neither showy nor august, but he had the authority of tradition in him and the sense of that place. The feeling of it can’t be captured. I kept turning to look at Christy, because we’d done it, we’d found him, and I wanted to see the joy I knew would be in his face. <> It was there, even though he wasn’t.
• * We all have to find a story to live by and live inside, or we couldn’t endure the certainty of suffering. That’s how it seems to me.
• They are some of the only surviving photographs of the parish entire, as if it were the last day of community and after this people would stay in their homes among the comforts of an electric solitude.
• The wisdom ran out there because he sent one of the Kellys for the holy water. I don’t know which one, at that age they all had the same tadpole face, but whichever it was, he defied all calculations of time and distance and didn’t come back, and still didn’t, finding a fresh wrong way to do a thing, and Moylan had to announce the hold-up to the crowd but assure them that Dublin was on standby.)
• And it did not matter that all of this would pass, that’s what occurred to me. It didn’t matter this time and place would be gone, that these feelings would go to the place of all feelings once pure and complete... all of them would be gone but be like remembered music or the amassed richness of a lived life.