SEBASTIAN BARRYI APOLOGIZE FOR THIS.....THE EDTING/FORMATTING DOES NOT WORK FOR ME
Some of my favorite excerpts from Sebastian Barry. Resist them if you can!
Start thinking in a different light…Some of his new thoughts offended even him. It had nothing to do with kings and countries, rebels or soldiers. Generals or their dark ambitions, their plus and their minus. It was that Death himself had made those things ridiculous. Death was the King of England, Scotland and Ireland. The King of France. Of India, Germany, Italy, Russia. Emperor of all the Empires. He had taken Willie’s companions, lifted away entire nations, looked down on their struggles with contempt and glee. The whole world had come out to decide some muddled question, and Death in delight rubbed his bloody hands. - from A LONG LONG WAY
Today, Death is still around and rubbing those bloody hands, yeah?
And these from THE WHEREABOUTS OF ENEAS McNULTY
How quick they come, how quick they go. Friendship. Oh, well. God sails his boats on the pond of the world and at fall of darkness goes off through the rubbed-out roses with the boats under his arms like a fabulous boy. The clock is the terrible high clouds fleeting to some unknown meeting. In the city encircling the park of the world lives are lived quickly, the admired baby soon the dreaming old bastard in the narrow suntrap under the lee of the church. Quickly quickly everything goes.
God as fabulous boy. That’s just about as perfect as any description I’ve ever heard. Here, Eneas talks to his mother:
‘Mam,’ he says, as the whiskey thaws his heart, ‘do you know, if it’s a sad life, it’s a bloody mysterious one too.’
‘It is’, she says……
‘Mam, I don’t understand the world, nor think I ever will, our going into it or our getting out of it. I am forty-four and none the wiser. Why is that?’
‘It seems to be the way for both of us, A bit of happiness here and there. Throw out your leg now and then and be dancing. Otherwise, a crooked way…’
And in The Secret Scripture, Roseanne McNulty is nearing 100 years of age. Lives in an Irish “mental” hospital, as she has for much of her adult life. ”No one even knows I have a story”, she muses early on. But what a story she has. And it’s told with such a breathtaking lyricism and cadence by Sebastian Barry, that you’d swear you’d lost yourself in a reverie of poetry. And Barry’s poetic bent is apparent right from the beginning when he has Roseanne tell the story of the time her father brought her to a tower with a bag of hammers and a bag of feathers in order to demonstrate Galileo’s assumption that all objects would fall at the same rate, no matter their weight, assuming a vacuum, of course. What they lacked was that vacuum. No matter. With her father at the top of a tower and Roseanne at the bottom, her father loosed the feathers and dropped the hammers.
Although there was not a breath of wind, the feathers immediately drifted away, dispersing like a little explosion, even rising greyly against the grey clouds, almost impossible to see. The feathers drifted, drifted away.
My father was calling, calling, in enormous excitement in the tower, ‘What do you see, what do you see?’
What did I see, what did I know? It is sometimes I think the strain of ridiculousness in a person, a ridiculousness, born maybe of desperation…that pierces you through with love for that person. It is all love, that not knowing, that not seeing. I am standing there, eternally, straining to see, a crick in the back of my neck, peering and straining, if for no other reason than for love of him. The feathers are drifting away, drifting, swirling away. My father is calling and calling. My heart is beating back to him. The hammers are falling still.
Here Roseanne recalls an incident from her childhood, which went into the local lore in a version that diverged from the truth.
For history as far as I can see is not the arrangement of what happens, in sequence and in truth, but a fabulous arrangement of surmises and guesses held up as a banner against the assault of withering truth.
History needs to be mightily inventive about human life because bare life is an accusation against man’s dominion of the earth.
And more from Roseanne on memory and time:
Memory, I suppose, if it is neglected becomes like a box room, or a lumber room in an old house, the contents jumbled about, maybe not only from neglect but also from too much haphazard searching in them, and things to boot thrown in that don’t belong there…
I am old enough to know that time passing is just a trick, a convenience. Everything is always there, still unfolding, still happening. The past, the present, and the future, in the noggin eternally, like brushes, combs and ribbons in a handbag.
Isn’t that just a wonderful passage? But Barry can strike sudden chords of humor as well in his same poetic style. Here, Roseanne speaks of John Kane, a maintenance worker at the ‘asylum’ where she lives:
At the same time he has been the same stranger to the washbasin and his flies were open as is mostly the case. Some day a small animal will notice his open flies and go in and live there, like a hedgehog in the inviting damp hollows of an ash tree
What I love about this group of books (besides the storytelling power and the sublime lyricism) is that there are characters that cross over from one book to the next. They all stand alone though, and can be read independently, and in any order. Given Roseanne’s stage in life in The Secret Scripture I’d really urge everyone – especially here – to read this one at the very least.
