Read Online Irish Journal by Heinrich Böll - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Heinrich Böll
Tags: Travel, Essays & Travelogues
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been wasted, how much must have been stolen, to make the unjustly famed military punctuality so proverbial: billions of stolen hours of time are the price for this prodigal kind of punctuality, not to mention the monsters of our day who have no time! They always seem to me like people with not enough skin.…)
There is ample time to meditate, for by now it is long after nine-thirty, perhaps the priests have got as far as the biology teacher, a minor subject after all, possibly a spur to hope. But even those who do not make use of the delay for meditation are looked after: records are played unstintingly, chocolate, ice cream, cigarettes are offered for sale, for here—what a blessing—smoking is permitted. There would probably be a rebellion if smoking at the movies were prohibited, for among the Irish the passion for moviegoing is coupled with that of smoking.
The rosy glow from the shells on the walls gives out a feeble light, and in the semidarkness the atmosphere is as lively as at a fair. Conversations are carried on across four rows of seats, jokes are shouted over eight; up front in the cheap seats the children are making the kind of cheerful racket heard otherwise only in school breaks; chocolates are proffered, cigarette brands exchanged, somewhere out of the dark comes the promising squeak of a cork being pulled out of a whisky bottle; make-up is renewed, perfume sprayed; somebody starts singing, and for those who do not allow that all these human sounds, movements, and activities are worth the trouble of occupying the passing time, there remains time for meditation; when God made time, He made plenty of it. Certainly in the use of time there is as much extravagance as thrift, and paradoxically enough it is the time-squanderers who also manageto save it, for they always have time when you ask them for some; time to take someone quickly to the station or the hospital; just as you can always ask money-squanderers for money, so time-squanderers are the savings banks where God deposits His time, keeping a reserve for when some is suddenly needed on an occasion where one of those people who never have enough time has spent it in the wrong place.
However: we have gone to the movies to see Ann Blyth, not to meditate, although meditation comes surprisingly easily and is pleasant enough in this fairground of lighthearted gaiety, where bog farmers, peat cutters, and fishermen offer cigarettes to and accept chocolates from seductively smiling ladies who drive around during the day in great cars, where the retired colonel chats with the postman about the merits and demerits of East Indians. Here classless society has become reality. It is a pity, though, that the air gets so stale: perfume, lipstick, cigarettes, the bitter smell of peat from clothes, even the music from the phonograph records seems to smell: it exudes the raw eroticism of the thirties, and the seats, splendidly upholstered in red velvet—if you are lucky you get one where the springs are not yet broken—these seats, probably deemed elegant in 1880 in Dublin (they must have seen Sullivan’s operas, perhaps also Yeats, Synge, and O’Casey, and early Shaw), these seats smell the way old velvet smells that resists the harshness of the vacuum cleaner, the savagery of the brush—and the theater is an unfinished new building, still without proper ventilation.
Well, the chatting priests and chaplains don’t seem to have got to the biology teacher after all, or are they discussing the janitor (an inexhaustible topic), or their first furtive cigarettes? Those who find the air too stale can go out and lean for a few minutes against the wall of the building: a clear, mild evening outside; the light from the lighthouse on Clare Island, twelve miles away, is not yet visible; the eye falls on the quiet sea across thirty, forty miles, beyond the edge of the bay as far as the mountains of Connemara and Galway—and lookingto the right, westward, you see high cliffs,
There is ample time to meditate, for by now it is long after nine-thirty, perhaps the priests have got as far as the biology teacher, a minor subject after all, possibly a spur to hope. But even those who do not make use of the delay for meditation are looked after: records are played unstintingly, chocolate, ice cream, cigarettes are offered for sale, for here—what a blessing—smoking is permitted. There would probably be a rebellion if smoking at the movies were prohibited, for among the Irish the passion for moviegoing is coupled with that of smoking.
The rosy glow from the shells on the walls gives out a feeble light, and in the semidarkness the atmosphere is as lively as at a fair. Conversations are carried on across four rows of seats, jokes are shouted over eight; up front in the cheap seats the children are making the kind of cheerful racket heard otherwise only in school breaks; chocolates are proffered, cigarette brands exchanged, somewhere out of the dark comes the promising squeak of a cork being pulled out of a whisky bottle; make-up is renewed, perfume sprayed; somebody starts singing, and for those who do not allow that all these human sounds, movements, and activities are worth the trouble of occupying the passing time, there remains time for meditation; when God made time, He made plenty of it. Certainly in the use of time there is as much extravagance as thrift, and paradoxically enough it is the time-squanderers who also manageto save it, for they always have time when you ask them for some; time to take someone quickly to the station or the hospital; just as you can always ask money-squanderers for money, so time-squanderers are the savings banks where God deposits His time, keeping a reserve for when some is suddenly needed on an occasion where one of those people who never have enough time has spent it in the wrong place.
However: we have gone to the movies to see Ann Blyth, not to meditate, although meditation comes surprisingly easily and is pleasant enough in this fairground of lighthearted gaiety, where bog farmers, peat cutters, and fishermen offer cigarettes to and accept chocolates from seductively smiling ladies who drive around during the day in great cars, where the retired colonel chats with the postman about the merits and demerits of East Indians. Here classless society has become reality. It is a pity, though, that the air gets so stale: perfume, lipstick, cigarettes, the bitter smell of peat from clothes, even the music from the phonograph records seems to smell: it exudes the raw eroticism of the thirties, and the seats, splendidly upholstered in red velvet—if you are lucky you get one where the springs are not yet broken—these seats, probably deemed elegant in 1880 in Dublin (they must have seen Sullivan’s operas, perhaps also Yeats, Synge, and O’Casey, and early Shaw), these seats smell the way old velvet smells that resists the harshness of the vacuum cleaner, the savagery of the brush—and the theater is an unfinished new building, still without proper ventilation.
Well, the chatting priests and chaplains don’t seem to have got to the biology teacher after all, or are they discussing the janitor (an inexhaustible topic), or their first furtive cigarettes? Those who find the air too stale can go out and lean for a few minutes against the wall of the building: a clear, mild evening outside; the light from the lighthouse on Clare Island, twelve miles away, is not yet visible; the eye falls on the quiet sea across thirty, forty miles, beyond the edge of the bay as far as the mountains of Connemara and Galway—and lookingto the right, westward, you see high cliffs,
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