Like the medieval scholar on pilgrimage (“And gladly wolde he lerne and gladly teche”), Frank is spending time with a whole new group of scientists. And Chaucer would have loved our current location in one of Spain’s loveliest cities, Galicia’s Santiago de Compostela.
A long pilgrim path winds all the way from France to the plaza in front of its glorious Baroque cathedral, next to a hotel established by Ferdinand and Isabella as a refuge for needy pilgrims in 1492.
Our kind hosts are putting us up in that very hotel, where we have spent some time wandering semi-lost among various fountained courtyards and huge granite corridors. After a lonnngg day of travel yesterday (it began with a 3:45 a.m. wake-up call in Dublin), we especially enjoyed the silence and darkness made possible by granite walls and huge wooden shutters that let us sleep until almost 9 a.m. today.
Many thanks to you, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella!
On the plane trip to Cork, I finally got around to reading my mother’s 1963 journal. She and my dad visited Ireland in mid-October of that year.
Summary: They rented a car and took off to see–everything! That is, everything compatible with sleeping late, taking naps, picking up hitchhikers, and making stops to drink tea. They hadn’t made a single hotel reservation–something that on this trip they never regretted. They enjoyed everything they saw, every person they met.
Left Limerick 10 a.m. 10-14-63.
3 sheep or cows? in Croagh
Thatched roof with TV antenna in Adare
Ruined church and fortress
Gypsy carts
Hitcher to Abbeyfrale–peat smoke. No talker.
Farmers market — cows, horses, pigs (in ricks), boxes of cabbages and of apples
Spent 3 hours going 56 miles. Ferns like a miniature ferngully.
Lunch delicious fricasseed lamb. Castlerosse Hotel. JMD [my dad] bought an Arran sweater 6/13.
Looked at various hotels in Killarney. Some stuffy, others quite unappealing. Settled on Hotel Europe, out of town on “lower lake,” lovely neat new hotel (German) fabulous view and food. Nap.
Dinner — sole — wow!
After dinner went into town. Bought Irish coffee glasses 6 for Mary 6 for us–all sent to Mary. Also 6 charms for cousins.
To bed. Awoke to howling wind–but warm.
10 – 15. Too cloudy for Ring, so going to Cork. Left K 11 a.m.
Aghadve — ruined cathedral and towers.
Filled tank 14 shillings. Button for battery. Blue-tail sheep.
Picked up lady near Low Bridge who was on way to a funeral in Ballyvourney cemetery next to Ballymakeery.
Took picture of fortress outside Macroon.
“Anglers Reast” in Beamish, prop. R. P. Leary. “Road Up.” Slate roofs with moss.
Lunch of tea and sandwiches at The Four Seasons in Dripsey. Irish Sweepstakes man–
Road to Blarney. hunter with dog. School bus — no one over 7 got off.
Blarney Castle — no lighting on wellworn circular stairs. Rooks. Boiling oil. Trees along walk–vines have to be cut off lest they weigh down the turrets and topple them. Old man at Druid’s well. Blarney indeed!
Into Cork through the Blackpool area. Whellbarrows of steaming mash. Man lying directly in road to check underside of car.
“Garda” in re map — “You’ll get me all confused with this thing” i.e. map. “It won’t take you any time at all, at all.” He was right.
Imperial Hotel. Victorianism is a Johnny-come-lately here! Heated towel racks–double pulley windows. V. comfortable. Good food. Wandered around town in evening just looking. Called Kim and Grampa 1:30 our time.
10 – 16 Slept over. Had fine breakfast in our room. 11:45 a.m. left.
Called Dr. Atkins. Retiring.
Men secretaries, lady bartenders.
Mother’s Pride Bread–unwrapped bread.
Stables marked by horse’s head.
Aghada — miles of fortifications to protect Cork harbor. No Murrays there now.
Church in Soleen (?) hooked shut. Flock of sheep–blue tail, red tail. Fat lady singing.
Midletown–poppies and daisies wild by the side of road–Prosperous town.
Bought harp charm 6/3 ear rings pin 16/ pendant for hockey 7/6
“I’ll have to ask himself.”
Stopped for early tea at the Blue Dragon Inn and Bar 5 mi. outside Mitchelstown–down the road from the Glocca Maura.
Mitchelstown–talked to 3 men–story of Jack Devine the laboring man and the rosary. Talk with Mr. Barrett at the tax collector. Visit the grave year–lichen covered crosses — old church — a hollow shell for vines. No perpetual care. Nettles.
But what was the story of Jack Devine and the rosary? The fat lady singing? Who was the “Irish sweepstakes man”? I’ll never know.
Frank and I, tracing part of their path, stopped for a delicious lunch at the Corbett Court–which turned out to be their own Blue Dragon Inn.
Yesterday’s shock was a civil servant (male), who passed on private government data that got used for attempts at blackmail. Today’s story is a civil servant (female) who repeatedly accessed the files of prominent people–often just days before their “confidential” data showed up in newspaper reports about them.
According to the Independent, nine different newspaper stories revealed private details that this civil servant leaked to them from government files. She also “improperly accessed” the private files of many others.
Only by chance was this ongoing abuse discovered, while officials were investigating a separate matter. And the woman remained in her job for almost a year before offering her resignation and taking her departure.
If only the private data of Irish citizens were half as secure as the job of a civil servant “protecting” that data!
Modern technology is made up of pre-made “black boxes.” If you open an iPhone, for instance, most of the stuff inside is just high-tech mystery stuff that was created to put in iPhone and used nowhere else.
This is the inside of an old radio, technology cobbled together from readymade pieces–bits of wire, a plastic knob, a few condensers, etc.
Maybe today everybody is trying to think “outside the box” because the stuff that’s inside the box is just too darn confusing.
October 14th, 2007 · Comments Off on Beautiful view of beautiful Irish countryside
Doesn’t the landscape look timeless?
Limestone caves, under the hill I was standing on to take this picture, were carved out when Ireland sat near the earth’s equator, with my “timeless” hilltop lying under a shallow sea full of coral and other warmwater-type creatures.
But enough philosophy–just enjoy the greens on these fields and the blues on this sky.
October 14th, 2007 · Comments Off on The Mom Song sung to William Tell Overture, with lyrics
As Akma says, love the standing ovation at the end. But who could have resisted? Snip:
Chew slowly
But hurry
The bus is here
Be careful
Come back here
Did you wash behind your ears?
Play outside, don’t play rough, will you just play fair?
Be polite, make a friend, don’t forget to share
Work it out, wait your turn, never take a dare
Get along! Don’t make me come down there
On April 21, 1851, young Patrick Devine (he was 9) set sail with his auntie Elizabeth (she was 27) from Liverpool to New York City. (How they got from their birthplace–Mitchelstown, in County Cork–I do not know.)
I also don’t know much about how, some forty years later, Patrick was established in Manchester, NH, as “the” Roman Catholic undertaker. (Patrick and his dad started off as carpenters, making little pine coffins.) Patrick’s second son, Maurice, annoyed both parents by leaving the family business to go to law school. My father J. Murray Devine was the son of Maurice.
So that’s why Frank Wilczek and I are in Cork tonight, headed north to Mitchelstown once we sleep off the minor stress of flying here from Stockholm. I’m told Mitchelstown is most famous for “boring cheese” and that earlier family visits failed to turn up the name Devine, even in graveyards.
Piffle. So what. I want to see for myself.
I’m also carrying with me a small talisman from the other side of my family of origin. My mother kept a journal (on onionskin paper) of her 1963 visit to Ireland, including Mitchelstown, which I am hoping to follow if that is possible. My father organized the trip but my mother recorded it for them.
My mother–who had not one drop of Irishness in her and didn’t like Guiness–considered that the worst scolding insult to one of her children was “You’re a disgrace to the name Devine.” My mother, who was adopted, wrote her own obituary and carefully omitted from said obituary her maiden name.
I’m planning to share more of her stuff with you as we go on.
So, what does that photograph of clouds over Stockholm have to do with the Nobel Prize or GMR? Not much really–except perhaps very indirectly, by way of Einstein’s sense of the mysterious.
October 8th, 2007 · Comments Off on Sin #8? It also makes us stupid.
Lust, gluttony, avarice, sloth, anger, envy, pride–the old Seven Deadly Sins name things that make us stupid.
And maybe our best protection against their power is knowing their names, so that our simple brains can guess it’s time to fight back when we see one of them kicking down our mental doors.
Why is there no one-word name for the deadly sin that sucked all brain cells from the brains-big-as-Buicks of Robert McNamara and Arthur M. Schlesinger?
“You like me, you really like me!” may be an inaccurate quote of Sally Field’s 1985 Oscar speech, but it’s a dead-on reflection of Sin #8, a craving at least as deadly as anger or avarice, much stronger than pride. The craving (O, junior high school!) for Popular Kids to pull us into their clubhouse–and backing that up, the fear that if we displease them we’re pushed out forever.
Schlesinger knows he is too easily beguiled and seems never to have allowed moral or ideological differences to interfere with his social pleasures…
Over decades of friendship with Henry Kissinger, he only slowly fathoms the diplomat’s “overpowering ego” and Machiavellian ways. “I like Henry very much and respect him,” he writes in 1969, “though I cannot rid myself of the fear that he says one sort of thing to me and another sort of thing to, say, Bill Buckley.”… By the time of Watergate, Schlesinger deems Kissinger “one of the most disgusting figures” in the Nixon White House.
Yet when Gerald Ford takes over and Henry asks Arthur to lunch at the State Department, our diarist overcomes his distaste…. Kissinger .. tells Schlesinger that Nixon was sometimes evil and lazy (with the work habits of Hitler) and a liar and obsessed with destroying the reputations of the Kennedys, and that he had Howard Hunt forging documents proving that John Kennedy had ordered the assassination of Diem. “He was unquestionably a weird president, but he was not a weak president,” Kissinger says. “But everything was weird in that slightly homosexual, embattled atmosphere of the White House.” Schlesinger doesn’t press on the “slightly homosexual”; he deems Henry “a highly intelligent and charming man.”
Is there one word strong enough for the stupidifying power of Sin #8?
“Conformity” is far too bloodless. It doesn’t capture the craving, the intoxication, the horrible fear of ending up shut outside if you don’t “go along.” Sin #8 needs a new name and maybe “Junior High School Sin” is ugly enough to deserve it.
It may no coincidence that so many whistleblowers have been outsiders whose keeping quiet could never have won them acceptance into the exciting secrets of the Big Boys’ Clubhouse.
If people smash champagne glasses after a wedding, so that no glass will never be used for a less-noble toast–shouldn’t I on that principle smash my digital camera?
Noooooo, I don’t think so. Maybe I’m not that idealistic. But I surely am awed by Norway’s lovely fjord country.
