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Authors: Niall Williams
Tags: Fiction
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and Swains are close cousins, not removed. We head off in a burst in some direction thinking this is it only to find ourselves nowhere.
Vision and blindness, that’s us in the Short Version.
Contrariness too. Grandfather came to Ireland just as anyone remotely Anglo went in the opposite direction.
That just raised the Standard. Grandfather decided that in Meath he would out-Wiltshire Wiltshire. He would make a better place to show his father and then one day invite the old Reverend over and say Behold . It’s a Paradise Complex. (I was going to do Psychology in college but then I read that Freud said Psychology was no use for Irish people, we’re either Too Deep or Not Deep at all.)
The Paradise Complex means you keep trying to make heaven on earth. You’re never satisfied. And that’s the crux, as the Philosopher Donie Downes says. See also: The Jerusalem Syndrome.
Grandfather couldn’t take the easy option. He couldn’t close his eyes and come up with one of those imaginary paradises of which there are so many accounts in my father’s library. Here’s Lucian in his True History of the Isles of the Blessed (Book 1,989, Utopias of the Mind , Crick & Howard, Bristol) who said he’d seen a town made of gold and streets paved with ivory and the whole encircled with ‘a river of superior perfume’. It never got dark there, and it never got light, but was in perpetual twilight and permanent springtime. Vines in paradise fruited once a month according to Lucian. There were 365 waterwells, 365 honeysprings, 7 rivers of milk, 8 rivers of wine (sorry, Charlie, no chocolate factory) and the people wore clothes of cobwebs because their bodies were so insubstantial . Look in Virgil’s Aeneid , Book VI (Book 1,000, trans. J. W. Mackail, Macmillan, London) where he talks about the Elysian Fields. What about heading there, Granda?
There are any number of imaginary gardens, most of which though were pooh-poohed by Sir Walter Raleigh, who after all that voyaging probably had what Mina Prendergast channelling Shakespeare called an unbuttoned scent, but whose ego was capacious enough to write The History of the World . Sir Walter pointed out that Homer’s description of the garden came from Moses’s description, and that in fact Pindar, Hesiod, Ovid, Pythagoras, Plato and all those chaps were actually a bunch of plagiarists who added to Old Moses their own Poetic Adornments. The real heavenly garden was copyrighted to Moses, and that was that. The rest was poppycock, Your Majesty.
Thank you, Walter, have a cigarette.
No. Grandfather wasn’t taking any route into the Imaginary. It was too easy. This was going to have to be actual grass-and-stones Paradise.
So Abraham laid Meath up against the Impossible Standard and began moulding the place into the dream version. He was going to do the So-Like-Paradise-You-Won’t-Believe-it’s-Not-Paradise kind of thing. Maybe there was already Something There to Work With, as that witch with the yellow highlights Miss Donnelly said to my mother at a parent–teacher meeting. Even so it can’t have been easy.
First of all he was, you know, an Englishman.
And as I said there weren’t exactly a whole load of those coming one-way to Ireland those days. The first Tourist Board was still meeting in some little room in Merrion Square and working on the posters and slogans. Civil War Over, Come Visit. We won’t kill you. Promise . Second, he was, sshssh , Not Belonging to Our Church (O Divine Lord) and third, after his Oxford education he didn’t know one side of a cow from the other. (Reader, there are sides. When I was five Nan showed me. She carried a three-legged stool and plonked it down next to Rosie, head-butting in against Rosie’s side and reaching in for the udder. You go from the opposite side and Rosie will break your wrist. Such a cow.)
The thing is, the Philosophy has a No Complaint clause. You can’t cry out and you can’t say this was a dreadful mistake .
You have
Vision and blindness, that’s us in the Short Version.
Contrariness too. Grandfather came to Ireland just as anyone remotely Anglo went in the opposite direction.
That just raised the Standard. Grandfather decided that in Meath he would out-Wiltshire Wiltshire. He would make a better place to show his father and then one day invite the old Reverend over and say Behold . It’s a Paradise Complex. (I was going to do Psychology in college but then I read that Freud said Psychology was no use for Irish people, we’re either Too Deep or Not Deep at all.)
The Paradise Complex means you keep trying to make heaven on earth. You’re never satisfied. And that’s the crux, as the Philosopher Donie Downes says. See also: The Jerusalem Syndrome.
Grandfather couldn’t take the easy option. He couldn’t close his eyes and come up with one of those imaginary paradises of which there are so many accounts in my father’s library. Here’s Lucian in his True History of the Isles of the Blessed (Book 1,989, Utopias of the Mind , Crick & Howard, Bristol) who said he’d seen a town made of gold and streets paved with ivory and the whole encircled with ‘a river of superior perfume’. It never got dark there, and it never got light, but was in perpetual twilight and permanent springtime. Vines in paradise fruited once a month according to Lucian. There were 365 waterwells, 365 honeysprings, 7 rivers of milk, 8 rivers of wine (sorry, Charlie, no chocolate factory) and the people wore clothes of cobwebs because their bodies were so insubstantial . Look in Virgil’s Aeneid , Book VI (Book 1,000, trans. J. W. Mackail, Macmillan, London) where he talks about the Elysian Fields. What about heading there, Granda?
There are any number of imaginary gardens, most of which though were pooh-poohed by Sir Walter Raleigh, who after all that voyaging probably had what Mina Prendergast channelling Shakespeare called an unbuttoned scent, but whose ego was capacious enough to write The History of the World . Sir Walter pointed out that Homer’s description of the garden came from Moses’s description, and that in fact Pindar, Hesiod, Ovid, Pythagoras, Plato and all those chaps were actually a bunch of plagiarists who added to Old Moses their own Poetic Adornments. The real heavenly garden was copyrighted to Moses, and that was that. The rest was poppycock, Your Majesty.
Thank you, Walter, have a cigarette.
No. Grandfather wasn’t taking any route into the Imaginary. It was too easy. This was going to have to be actual grass-and-stones Paradise.
So Abraham laid Meath up against the Impossible Standard and began moulding the place into the dream version. He was going to do the So-Like-Paradise-You-Won’t-Believe-it’s-Not-Paradise kind of thing. Maybe there was already Something There to Work With, as that witch with the yellow highlights Miss Donnelly said to my mother at a parent–teacher meeting. Even so it can’t have been easy.
First of all he was, you know, an Englishman.
And as I said there weren’t exactly a whole load of those coming one-way to Ireland those days. The first Tourist Board was still meeting in some little room in Merrion Square and working on the posters and slogans. Civil War Over, Come Visit. We won’t kill you. Promise . Second, he was, sshssh , Not Belonging to Our Church (O Divine Lord) and third, after his Oxford education he didn’t know one side of a cow from the other. (Reader, there are sides. When I was five Nan showed me. She carried a three-legged stool and plonked it down next to Rosie, head-butting in against Rosie’s side and reaching in for the udder. You go from the opposite side and Rosie will break your wrist. Such a cow.)
The thing is, the Philosophy has a No Complaint clause. You can’t cry out and you can’t say this was a dreadful mistake .
You have
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