The Road Less Traveled

My wife Karen took these on our drive back to Dublin.  

We get a kick out of the road signs here, especially when the road is "slippy."

The Troubles

The Hunger Strike memorial honoring the ten IRA members who died during the 1981 hunger strike in the HM Prison Maze in Northern Ireland, just outside Belfast. Bobby Sands was the first to die (after 66 days). His funeral was attended by more than 100,000 people. The film "Hunger" has just been released which focuses on these significant events.

I often ask locals the question of why this island is not a united island today. I never seem to get a straight answer. Nobody wants to talk about it. I'm told that it's too hurtful, the scars are too deep as a legacy from "the troubles."

My wife and I recently took a trip up to Northern Ireland, to Derry, the city where the riots first broke out after the RUC (N. Irish police) attacked a peaceful civil rights march in 1968. This event was seen as a trigger for the decades of violence that followed. The Bogside area of the city was also the spot where Bloody Sunday occurred in 1972 where British paramilitary troops murdered 14 civilians (including seven teenagers) and shot and wounded another 14.

We had a private tour conducted by an IRA member and former prisoner who witnessed the events of Bloody Sunday. His perspective is that the British controlled the media, spinning it as a Catholic vs. Protestant issue, when this was clearly not the case. It was, and remains, an issue of colonization. All I can say is that he spoke his truth. And it was powerful.

If you're interested in any of this history, I highly recommend the following films:

• "Michael Collins" (1996)
• "Bloody Sunday" (2002)
• "The Wind That Shakes the Barley" (2006)
• "Hunger" (2008)

The murals below were painted by a trio of artists to signify the events of Bloody Sunday and the sectarian violence in the Bogside area of Derry during "the troubles." It's known as the People's Gallery.

Dublin

at night...

Henrik Ibsen

Norwegian playwright (1828-1906)

"The title of the play is Hedda Gabler.  My intention in giving it this name was to indicate that Hedda as a personality is to be regarded rather as her father's daughter than as her husband's wife.  It was not really my intention to deal in this play with so-called problems.  What I principally wanted to do was to depict human beings, human emotions, and human destinies, upon a groundwork of certain social conditions and principles of the present day.  When you have read the whole, my fundamental idea will be clearer to you than I can make it by entering into further explanations." 

On writing...

• "Writing has... been to me like a bath from which I have risen feeling cleaner, healthier, and freer."
• "At the moment of conception one must be on fire, but at the time of writing, cold."
• "I can only speak freely through the mouths of characters in a play."
• "Before I write down one word, I have to have the character in mind through and through.  I must penetrate into the last wrinkle of his soul.  I always proceed from the individual; the stage setting, the dramatic ensemble, all of that comes naturally and does not cause me any worry, as soon as I am certain of the individual in every aspect of his humanity. But I have to have his exterior in mind also, down to the last button, how he stands and walks, how he conducts himself, what his voice sounds like.  Then I do not let him go until his fate is fulfilled."
• "To live is to war with trolls in heart and soul.  To write is to sit in judgement on oneself."
• "The essential thing is... to draw a clear distinction between what one has merely experienced and what one has spiritually lived through; for only the latter is proper material for creative writing."

Hedda Gabler

We recently saw this play at the Gate Theater in Dublin.

Described as "Brian Friel's Variations on a Play by Ibsen," this was the first time I'd seen "Hedda Gabler," though I first read the play maybe ten or fifteen years ago.

Written in 1890, this still remains one of the classic dramas based upon a modern female character of great strength and inner conflict. Hedda at her core is a woman that wishes she were a man.

There was not an empty seat in this medium-sized theater for this limited run. This suited me just fine as it added a particular energy to the experience of the play. This combined with the quick pacing of the updated 19th Century dialogue made for a formidable and enjoyable theater experience.

Still one of the best and most shocking endings of any play (though I think it plays out better in the reader's mind than what is experienced as a theater-goer).

T.S. Eliot

• "Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal."
• "The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality."
• "Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far they can go."
• "The more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the man which creates."
• "Between the idea and the reality, between the motion and the act, falls the shadow."

Friedrich Nietzsche - The Beyond in Art

Even though his father and grandfather were Lutheran ministers, Nietzsche was scornful of religion.  He believed that Christianity's focus on the afterlife made people less capable in handling their existing lives.  

However, with that said, he was very appreciative of art and recognized that great art must have a metaphysical influence...  "If belief in such heavenly truth declines in general, then that species of art can never flourish again which -- like the Divine Comedy, the paintings of Raphael, the frescoes of Michelangelo, the Gothic cathedrals -- presupposes not only a cosmic but a metaphysical significance in the objects of art."

I couldn't agree more.

D.C.

Even Jefferson knew...

... that red wine has its health benefits.

Founding Founders

I was in Virginia recently for a wedding and had an opportunity to visit Monticello.

A visit to D.C. and other Founder-related sites should be mandatory for all American citizens at some stage in their life. I am in awe of these giant figures of great passion that did so much to have a positive impact on the world. This is what real change is. To risk body and soul to form a new country, a new political system based on an ideal, to do something that nobody in history had ever done before or since.

Some food for thought from Jefferson himself:

• Pride costs us more than hunger, thirst and cold.
• Love your neighbor as yourself, and your country more than yourself.
• Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens. They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous...
• Nothing in Europe can counterbalance the freedom, the simplicity, the friendship and the domestic felicity we enjoy in America.
• I hope and firmly believe that the whole world will, sooner or later, feel benefit from the issue of our assertion of the rights of man.
• I cannot live without books.
• [on France]... she is the wealthiest but worst governed country on earth.
• But why send an American youth to Europe for education?
• [on Great Britain]... of all nations on earth they require to be treated with the most hauteur. They require to be kicked into common good manners.
• There is a fullness of time when men should go, and not occupy too long the ground to which others have a right to advance.
• There is a debt of service due from every man to his country, proportioned to the bounties which nature and fortune have measured to him.
• The man who loves his country on its own account, and not merely for its trappings of interest or power, can never be divorced from it; can never refuse to come forward when he finds that she is engaged in dangers which he has the means of warding off.
• The man who is dishonest as a statesman would be a dishonest man in any station.
• Responsibility weighs with its heaviest force on a single head.
• With the same honest views, the most honest men often form different conclusions.
• As the Creator has made no two faces alike, so no two minds, and probably no two creeds.
• Nothing is so important as that America shall separate herself from the systems of Europe, and establish one of her own.
• My idea is that we should be made one nation in every case concerning foreign affairs, and separate ones in whatever is merely domestic.
• [on the Presidency]... no man will ever bring out of that office the reputation which carries him into it.
• A nation ceases to be republican only when the will of the majority ceases to be the law.
• A nation united can never be conquered.
• The object of walking is to relax the mind. You should therefore not permit yourself even to think while you walk. But direct your attention by the objects surrounding you. Walking is the best possible exercise. Habituate yourself to walk very far.
• It is always better to have no ideas than false ones and to believe nothing, than to believe what is wrong.
• Experience alone brings skill.
• You live in a country where talents, learning, and honesty are so much called for that every man who possesses these may be what he pleases.
• I am a real Christian; that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus.
• The will of the people... is the only legitimate foundation of any government.
• Without virtue, happiness cannot be.
• The essence of virtue is in doing good to others.