It was in the early 1960s that I forsook
the town of my birth and moved to Dublin. And “forsook” is the
appropriate word. During the first 18 years of my life that I spent in
Wexford, I treated the place as no more than a staging post on my way
elsewhere. I had so little interest in the town that I did not even
bother to learn the names of most of the streets. In imaginative terms,
this indifference to my birthplace, to its history, and to the complex
and subtle life of its people, was not only arrogant but foolish, and
wasteful, too. That in my immediate surroundings there was a world
interesting enough to be worthy of an artist’s attention—and from
earliest days I had no doubt that I was going to be an artist of some
kind or other—is amply attested to in the work of such Wexford writers
as Colm Tóibín, Eoin Colfer and Billy Roche, all three of whom, and
Roche in particular, have made a trove of rich coinage out of what I
regarded as base metal, when I deigned to regard it at all.
I might defend myself, indeed I might even deny the need for such a defence, by saying that I have never in my life paid much attention to my surroundings wherever it was I happened to find myself—artistic attention, that is. For good or ill, as a writer I am and always have been most concerned not with what people do—that, as Joyce might say, with typical Joycean disdain, can be left to the journalists—but with what they. Art is a constant effort to strike past the mere daily doings of humankind in order to arrive at, or at least to approach as closely as possible, the essence of what it is, simply, to be. It’s as legitimate for the artist to address the question of being as it is for the philosopher—as Heidegger himself acknowledged when he remarked that in his philosophizing he was seeking only to achieve what Rilke had already done in poetry. No doubt he was thinking of lines such as these, from the ninth of Rilke’s Duino Elegies—in the somewhat antiquated but sympathetic Leishman/Spender translation—which sets out by asking why we should bother to be human and live at all, then ventures this magnificent reply:
I might defend myself, indeed I might even deny the need for such a defence, by saying that I have never in my life paid much attention to my surroundings wherever it was I happened to find myself—artistic attention, that is. For good or ill, as a writer I am and always have been most concerned not with what people do—that, as Joyce might say, with typical Joycean disdain, can be left to the journalists—but with what they. Art is a constant effort to strike past the mere daily doings of humankind in order to arrive at, or at least to approach as closely as possible, the essence of what it is, simply, to be. It’s as legitimate for the artist to address the question of being as it is for the philosopher—as Heidegger himself acknowledged when he remarked that in his philosophizing he was seeking only to achieve what Rilke had already done in poetry. No doubt he was thinking of lines such as these, from the ninth of Rilke’s Duino Elegies—in the somewhat antiquated but sympathetic Leishman/Spender translation—which sets out by asking why we should bother to be human and live at all, then ventures this magnificent reply:
. . . because being here is much, and because all this
that’s here, so fleeting, seems to require us and strangely
concerns us. Us the most fleeting of all. Just once,
everything, only for once. Once and no more. And we, too,
once. And never again. But this
having been once, though only once,
having been once on earth—can it ever be cancelled?
that’s here, so fleeting, seems to require us and strangely
concerns us. Us the most fleeting of all. Just once,
everything, only for once. Once and no more. And we, too,
once. And never again. But this
having been once, though only once,
having been once on earth—can it ever be cancelled?
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