ONWARD AND UPWARD . . .

As our days dwindle down to a precious few, every hour seems to be precious too and thus becomes jam-packed. Today—Saturday, our second-to-last full day together in Ireland—we squeezed in more than I thought possible.

We started the day by making our way toward the National Gallery of Ireland, which is only about a 5-minute walk from our digs at Trinity College.  But along the way we decided to stop for a visit at Sweny’s, a “chemist’s shop” that Leopold Bloom steps into in the “Lotus-Eaters” episode of Ulysses: we stepped into it too, and like Bloom most of us bought a bar a lemon soap there!

We then continued around the corner to Merrion Square where we visited a statue of renowned playwright, novelist and wit Oscar Wilde, which is located directly across the street from the house where he grew up.

The next stop was our first crucial destination of the day—the National Gallery of Ireland, which houses many major works of Irish art . . . including a fine collection of paintings by Jack Butler Yeats.  The Gallery also had a special display of paintings linked to Joyce’s Dubliners—those dovetailed nicely with our reading for our course—and an ongoing display of essential works capturing the texture of Irish life in the 19th century in particular.  We also sought out the remarkable Caravaggio painting, “The Taking of Christ,” which is the subject of a best-selling book, The Lost Painting by Jonathan Harr.  Missing for almost 200 years, the painting was discovered in a Jesuit residence in Dublin in 1993.  It is now on extended loan to the National Gallery.

But at that point we had only just begun our day—and suddenly it was time to move onward . . . to the National Library.  The “Scylla and Charybdis” episode of Ulysses is set there, but the main reading room of the Library is not open on a Saturday, so we had to satisfy our inner Stephen Dedalus by pausing in the portico and remembering, as he does, a moment in Joyce’s earlier novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: “Here I watched the birds for augury.  Aengus of the birds.  They go, they come.  Last night I flew.  Easily flew. . . .”  But our primary reason for visiting the Library was to see the terrific William Butler Yeats exhibit in the basement: arranged in glass cabinets and alcoves, the exhibit comprises books, manuscripts, photographs, videos, memorabilia, ephemera—all things Yeatsian!  This stop had been on our itinerary for earlier in the week but got bumped by our extended visit to #15 Usher’s Island.  We all agreed that we could have doubled our time with this exhibit, but we had to move onward once again . . . if we wanted also to move upward.

And for some students on this 11-day journey, moving literally upward was their very raison d’être—or at least their reason for being on this trip.  So we walked down to Westland Row and boarded the DART train for Sandycove, the location of what is known as “Joyce’s Tower”—also known as the James Joyce Museum.  The Museum is housed in a Martello tower, one of around fifty built along the Irish coast by the British in the early 1800s as lookouts and defense posts against an anticipated (but never realized) Napoleonic invasion of Ireland.  Its importance for Joyceans is twofold.  First of all, Joyce himself lived there briefly in 1904 as a guest of Oliver St. John Gogarty, who became the model for Stephen Dedalus’s nemesis, Buck Mulligan, in Ulysses.  Secondly, it is the setting for the opening episode of Ulysses, “Telemachus,” which we read in class back in Boston.  In that episode, Buck Mulligan refers to the tower as the “omphalos”—the Greek word for “navel” but also in Greek mythology the center of Zeus’s world (generally associated with the Delphic oracle).  Small wonder that it is also the omphalos—the ultimate destination—for Joyceans, whether diehard or casual.

But I would be remiss if I did not mention how fortunate we were to get inside the tower.  Like much of the rest of Europe, Ireland is in the midst of a serious fiscal crisis.  One immediate impact of that crisis is a funding shortage (and thus a staffing shortage) for national treasures like the James Joyce Museum.  In fact, the Museum is now open only by appointment and not usually (if ever) on Saturdays.  Fortunately for us, the longtime curator of the Museum, Robert Nicholson, made an exception and generously opened the doors for us—and also gave us a richly detailed talk on the history and the resonance of the tower.  He made us all feel welcome and at home in this very special place and space.