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The Importance of Taking Liberties

Posted in History, Literature, Politics, Television with tags , , , , on August 18, 2025 by telescoper

The last episode of Simon Schama‘s BBC TV series A History of Britain, called “The Two Winstons”, follows the story of the Second World War and its immediate aftermath through the eyes of two very different Englishmen, George Orwell and Winston Churchill. Near the end of the programme Schama talks about the year 1948, when a very sick Orwell wrote his last major novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four. I’ve reconstructed this section from the subtitles on my DVD of the series.

It starts with a direct quote from 1984

In our world there will be no love but the love of Big Brother, no laughter but that of triumph. No art, no science, no literature, no enjoyment, but always and only, Winston, there will be the thrill of power. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever.

It continues with the voice of Simon Schama as narrator

To clear his head of the static hum of postwar London, Orwell went as far away as he could without actually leaving Britain, to the very edge of the kingdom – the Hebridean island of Jura. No electricity, no telephone, post twice a week, maybe.

And it was here, in the remotest cottage he could find, typing in bed with the machine on his knees, knowing he hadn’t long to live, that Orwell concentrated on what mattered most to him, and to Britain – the fate of freedom in the age of superpowers. As Churchill issued his grim warnings, Orwell created a common or garden plain man’s Winston – Winston Smith. The year was 1948.

When we think of 1984, most of us think of the tyranny of drabness and mass obedience ruled by Big Brother, a world of doublespeak where war is peace and lies are truth. But Orwell’s last masterpiece is most powerful and most lyrical when it describes Winston’s resistance to dictatorship, a guerrilla action fought, not with guns and barricades, but by literally taking liberties, a walk in the country, an act of love, the singing of an old nursery rhyme.

Winston Smith did all these forbidden things, prompted by a dim memory of a time when they were absolutely normal. The last refuge of freedom against Big Brother is memory. The greatest horror of 1984 is the dictator’s attempt to wipe out history.

I thought of the last sentence when I read about Donald Trump’s plan to rewrite American history for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, but that’s just one example amid the rise of authoritarian regimes around the world. In the context of the TV programme, Schama was making a case for the importance of history as a discipline, but there is something else important to say: we should not forget the past but, perhaps even more importantly, neither should we forget about the future we wanted to see. The present is not the future I hoped for when I was younger, even in 1984, but the story isn’t over yet.

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Forgetfulness – Billy Collins

Posted in Poetry with tags , , on August 10, 2025 by telescoper 
The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago you kissed the names of the nine muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue
or even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall

well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted   
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

by Billy Collins (b 1941)

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The Confirmation – Edwin Muir

Posted in Poetry with tags , on July 24, 2025 by telescoper 
Yes, yours, my love, is the right human face.
I in my mind had waited for this long,
Seeing the false and searching for the true,
Then found you as a traveller finds a place
Of welcome suddenly amid the wrong
Valleys and rocks and twisting roads. But you,
What shall I call you? A fountain in a waste,
A well of water in a country dry,
Or anything that's honest and good, an eye
That makes the whole world seem bright. Your open heart,
Simple with giving, gives the primal deed,
The first good world, the blossom, the blowing seed,
The hearth, the steadfast land, the wandering sea.
Not beautiful or rare in every part.
But like yourself, as they were meant to be.

by Edwin Muir (1887-1959)

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Small Things Like These, by Claire Keegan

Posted in Literature with tags , , on July 23, 2025 by telescoper

Now on a bit of a roll, I’ve finished reading the third of the  six novels I bought earlier this year. The first of these I read was Foster, by Claire Keegan who also wrote the latest, Small Things Like These. There’s much in common between these two works, not only in the beautifully spare writing style with which the stories are told, but also in the message hope of they find in grim circumstances.

The current book is revolves around a character called Tom Furlong, a hard-working and moderately successful timber and coal merchant who makes deliveries around his neighbourhood. It is set in the 1980s, in a time of economic recession, shortly before Christmas. Tom is happily married with five daughters. Tom doesn’t know who his father was; he was raised by a kindly Protestant lady. One day making his delivery round takes him to the local convent, where he sees the harsh treatment of young unmarried mothers in the Magdalene laundry run by the nuns; later visiting the same place to deliver coal he finds a young girl locked in the coalhouse, in the freezing cold. These and other episodes unsettle Tom, by making him think about how lucky he has been, largely thanks to the kindness of others, and how small things can make a huge difference to how one’s life turns out. What he does at the end of the story is not a small thing at all, and we aren’t told how it works out, but it is an act of kindness and he does it for all the right reasons, so we feel it will somehow all work out for the best.

The last novel I wrote about was a work of historical fiction, and so is this. Although it is set in the 1980s, that was a time in which social attitudes in Ireland were much more dominated by the Roman Catholic Church than they are now, the cruelty of the mother-and-baby homes being just one example. Keegan is at pains to point out that the convent is right next door to the local school, two aspects of the same system of social control.

Small Things Like These was published in 2021 and has already been made into a film featuring Cillian Murphy. I haven’t seen the film, unlike Foster in which case I saw the film based on it, An Cailín Ciúin, before reading the book. I must see the film.

P.S. At the end I found myself thinking of these lines from Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey

As have no slight or trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man's life,
His little, nameless, unremembered, acts
Of kindness and of love.

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Star of the Sea, by Joseph O’Connor

Posted in History, Literature with tags , on July 20, 2025 by telescoper

After the excitement of today’s Hurling Final, I finished the second of the six novels I bought earlier this year. Star of the Sea by Joseph O’Connor is set in 1847 and onboard the ship that gives the novel its name, bound for New York from Ireland, carrying desperate passengers fleeing the Great Famine, which provides the overall context for the story.

It’s worth quoting a couple of paragraphs from the author’s introduction to the novel:

We tourists take pleasure in the emptiness of Connemara. There are reasons why such a silence exists. You would not think, as you amble the sleepy lanes, as you are stilled by the twilight descending on the mountain, that you are walking through a space that was once a disaster zone: the Ground Zero, perhaps, of Victorian Europe. These meadows, those pebbled fields, saw astonishing suffering. There was heroism too; there was extraordinary courage and love. But these wine-dark boglands and rutted boreens witnessed tragedy so immense that those that witnessed it, like Grantley Dixon in my novel, would never forget the sight.

All this happened in the 1840s , that decade in which a million of the Irish underclass died as a consequence of famine. residents of the richest kingdom on earth, they lived only a few hundred miles from the empire’s capital, London. But that did not save them; nothing saved them. Abandoned by the dominant of Ireland and Britain, perhaps two million of the desperate became refugees. We might call them `asylum seekers’ or `economic migrants’. They fled their homeland by any means possible, often on ships like the Star of the Sea. Their language, Gaelic, already in decline virtually disappeared overnight. `Mharbh an gorta achanrud‘, one Gaelic speaker remembered. ‘The famine killed everything’.

O’Connor writes unflinchingly about the effects of famine, the poverty, deprivation and starvation, as well as the squalid rqat-infested conditions the `economic migrants’ were forced to endure on their month-long voyage to America. This in itself is interesting, as it has always seemed to me quite surprising that so few Irish authors have written books about An Gorta Mór. But while the Great Hunger is always present, and is what precipitates most of the action, this book is about many other things besides.

The story begins on Star of the Sea with a mysterious character who is taken to walking the decks at night. We learn very early on that his name is Pius Mulvey and his intention is to commit murder. But who is he to kill, and how, and why? The answer to the last of these questions is revealed through a series of flashbacks that reveal connections between him and several passengers in First Class, including a bankrupt Lord Merridith attempting to escape his creditors, Merridith’s wife and family, an aspiring novelist (the Grantley Dixon mentioned above), and a maidservant (Mary Duane) whose connection to them and to Mulvey is deeply tragic. The narrative is interspersed with excerpts from the log of the ship’s Captain, sundry clippings from contemporary newspapers and magazines, including examples of vile anti-Irish racism from the satirical magazine, Punch, and folk songs of the time. It’s all very carefully and cleverly plotted.

It’s partly a mystery novel, partly a suspense thriller, and partly a social commentary worthy of Dickens (who actually appears in the book, in chapters describing Pius Mulvey’s past life in London). It takes a master story-teller to bring all these elements together convincingly, and that is what Joseph O’Connor clearly is. It is not exactly a whodunnit, but I will nevertheless refrain from posting any spoilers as the ending is very clever (as indeed is the whole book). I’ll just say that I found the whole book immensely satisfying and I recommend it highly, as a novel that has real depth as well as being a true page-turner.

Star of the Sea was published in 2002, and was a best-seller then. It’s taken me too long to discover it. I must read more by Joseph O’Connor, but I have four others on my list to finish first!

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Foster, by Claire Keegan

Posted in Literature with tags , on June 23, 2025 by telescoper

I can’t believe that it’s three months since I splashed out on six books in an attempt to restart my reading habit. Anyway, I took the opportunity of the by train trip down to Cork to read Claire Keegan’s novella Foster, as it was this work that inspired the beautiful Irish language film An Cailín Ciúin which I blogged about here. It’s a very short book, only 88 pages, but is an absolute gem. Keegan’s prose is spare but beautifully crafted and manages to convey great emotional depth largely by what is not said. For once the gushing praise not only on the jacket but also in the few pages of preamble is fully justified. I must read more by Claire Keegan. If there’s anything even more remarkable than the book, it’s how perfectly the film captures its essence.

There’s a line in the book that I remember well from the film

Many’s the man lost much because he missed a perfect opportunity to say nothing.

Ain’t that the truth.

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Climbing to Seefin Passage Tomb on the Summer Solstice – Tarn MacArthur

Posted in Poetry with tags , , on June 20, 2025 by telescoper
Seefin Passage Tomb, County Wicklow, photographed by Joe King – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26328239

The Summer Solstice in the Northern Hemisphere takes place tomorrow, on Saturday June 21 2025, at 02:42 UTC (03:42am local Irish Time). In advance of the big event I thought I’d share this poem I found online, which seems appropriate to the occasion.

No one knows what calls us, days like this
that seem to stretch all sense of reason:
the hillside scrub abuzz with silver-washed

and dark green fritillary, the red grouse
and hare, a lone buzzard counterpoised
on the breeze overhead, near motionless,

weighing the balance of each warm
and distant heartbeat. And who would
claim the old gods dead when the sudden

cadence of your breath slips to the sound
of something pulsing through from the far side
of the ridge, neither ghost nor glossolalia

but wholly of the earth, like the hum
that guided you through summer nights
in childhood when you found yourself alone,

and a field too far from home, as the light
began to fade. Sometimes what we love
is the incongruity of things: the latent sense

of having been here yet having never been
before, that strangely familiar clutch of stones,
how every shadow beckons with a promise

of safekeeping. If, as someone said,
it’s true that the souls to match our souls
lie patiently in wait to take our places

when we step aside, then we should lower
our sights from the brilliance of the sky
and down towards this aperture of darkness.

To enter the tomb is to enter the one world
we know, the cool walls of the passage
summoning us forth with the chance hope

of an earthly meeting. Alone, you are
not alone, the carved stone appears to say.
Nothing is eternal, and everything remains.

by Tarn MacArthur

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Bloomsday 2025

Posted in Literature with tags , , , on June 16, 2025 by telescoper

So it’s 16th June, a very special day in Ireland – especially Dublin – because 16th June 1904 is the date on which the story takes place of Ulysses by James Joyce. Bloomsday – named after the character Leopold Bloom – is an annual celebration not only of all things Joycean but also of Ireland’s wider cultural and literary heritage.

If you haven’t read Ulysses yet then you definitely should. It’s one of the great works of modern literature. And don’t let people put you off by telling you that it’s a difficult read. It’s a long read,  that’s for sure -it’s over 900 pages – but the writing is full of colour and energy and it has a real sense of place. It’s a wonderful book. I’ve read it three times now, once as a teenager, once in my thirties, and again last year when I’d reached sixty.

Anyway, here’s an excerpt with an astromomical theme, which seems to me to fit this blog:

With what meditations did Bloom accompany his demonstration to his companion of various constellations?

Meditations of evolution increasingly vaster: of the moon invisible in incipient lunation, approaching perigee: of the infinite lattiginous scintillating uncondensed milky way, discernible by daylight by an observer placed at the lower end of a cylindrical vertical shaft 5000 ft deep sunk from the surface towards the centre of the earth: of Sirius (alpha in Canis Maior) 10 lightyears (57,000,000,000,000 miles) distant and in volume 900 times the dimension of our planet: of Arcturus: of the precession of equinoxes: of Orion with belt and sextuple sun theta and nebula in which 100 of our solar systems could be contained: of moribund and of nascent new stars such as Nova in 1901: of our system plunging towards the constellation of Hercules: of the parallax or parallactic drift of socalled fixed stars, in reality evermoving wanderers from immeasurably remote eons to infinitely remote futures in comparison with which the years, threescore and ten, of allotted human life formed a parenthesis of infinitesimal brevity.

I’ll also mention that, starting at 8am on  RTÉ Radio 1 Extra (but also available at other times on the RTÉ player), you  can listen to the classic radio broadcast of Ulysses from 1982.

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He Asked About the Quality – C.P. Cavafy

Posted in LGBTQ+, Poetry with tags , , , on June 15, 2025 by telescoper 
He left the office where he'd been given
a trivial, poorly paid job
(something like eight pounds a month, including bonuses)-
left at the end of the dreary work
that kept him bent all afternoon,
came out at seven and walked off slowly,
idling his way down the street. Good-looking,
and interesting: showing as he did that he'd reached
his full sensual capacity.
He'd turned twenty-nine the month before.

He idled his way down the main street
and the poor side-streets that led to his home.

Passing in front of a small shop that sold
cheap and flimsy merchandise for workers,
he saw a face inside, a figure
that compelled him to go in, and he pretended
he wanted to look at some coloured handkerchiefs.

He asked about the quality of the handkerchiefs
and how much they cost, his voice choking,
almost silenced by desire.
And the answers came back in the same mood,
distracted, the voice hushed,
offering hidden consent.

They kept on talking about the merchandise-
but the only purpose: that their hands might touch
over the handkerchiefs, that their faces, their lips,
might move close together as though by chance-
a moment's meeting of limb against limb.

Quickly, secretly, so the shop owner sitting at the back
wouldn't realize what was going on.

by C.P. Cavafy (1863-1933; from Collected Poems, translated by Edmund Heeley and Philip Sherrard)

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R.I.P. Edmund White (1940-2025)

Posted in Biographical, LGBTQ+, Literature, R.I.P. with tags , on June 6, 2025 by telescoper

I was saddened to hear of the death on Tuesday at the age of 85 of novelist Edmund White. Like many gay men of my age I read his semi-autobiographical novel A Boy’s Own Story as a teenager, and it had a profound effect on me.

It’s the story of an adolescent boy coming to terms with his sexuality in the American mid-West during the 1950s. It is as frank about the description of gay sex as it is truthful about the confusion that goes with being a teenager. When I bought it I didn’t realize it was going to be so sexually explicit, as the whole subject of gay sex was very much taboo in those days. I didn’t think it was possible to write about such things in such a matter-of-fact way and at the same time so beautifully. The book is also unflinching in its description of the personality flaws of the central character.

The Irish Times has a collection of reflections by various writers on Edmund White that say far more, and far more eloquently, than I ever could. I’ll just say, as a (now) sixty-something gay man that Edmund White helped me on my journey to self-acceptance when I was a struggling teenager all those years ago, and for that I will always be profoundly grateful.

Rest in peace, Edmund White (1940-2025).

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