The Depositions by Thomas Lynch

Author:Thomas Lynch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Epub3
ISBN: 9781324003984
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2019-08-28T00:00:00+00:00

FROM THE POST-FAMINE cottage of my great-great-grandfather, to the Moveen my great-grandfather left in 1890, to the West Clare that Dorothea Lang photographed in the mid-1950s, to the Ireland I found in 1970, the greatest change in a hundred years was light—electric light. So says my neighbor J. J. McMahon, a scholarly and insightful man. It illuminated the dark hours, lengthened the evenings, shortened the winter’s terrible hold. Folks read later, talked later, went out in the night, certain their lamps would see them home. Still, life remained circumscribed by the limited range of transportation and communication. The immediate universe for most small farmers extended no farther than town, church, and marketplace, distances managed by ass and cart, or horse and trap, on Raleigh bike, or on foot—shank’s mare, as it was locally called. Communication was by gossip and bush telegraph, from kitchen to kitchen, with the postman up the road, with the men to and from the creamery, with the priest or teacher on their daily rounds, with women returning from market stalls. Talk was almost entirely parochial. The “wireless”—electric light’s chatty cousin—brought news of the larger world in thrice-daily doses whilst newspapers were read aloud, entirely. Still, these were one-sided communiqués. There was no escape, no geographical cures, no way to get out of the local into the world. Folks had to live with one another. This made them more likely to bear fellow feelings, to understand, to empathize. However much familiarity bred contempt—and it bred its share—the neighbors shared a common life experience, the same perils, the same hopes for their children, the same borders and limitations. They formed, if only by default, a community.

In the kitchens, shops, and snugs of those remote parishes, the visitor or stranger or traveler was, much like the bards of old, a bearer of tidings unheard before, like correspondence from a distant country, or a missionary or a circus come to town. The new voice at the fire relieved the tedium of the everyday, the usual suspects in the house, the same dull redundancy of the Tuesday that followed Monday, which in its turn followed Sunday, where the priest gave the same sermon he had last year at about the same time.

I was such a Playboy of the Western World, in the months of my first visit to West Clare. Deposed for hours on a variety of topics (music, money, presidential politics), and my opinion sought on all manner of things (the war in Vietnam, who shot Kennedy, the future of Ireland), I thought I must be a very interesting specimen indeed. It was years before I understood that, during those blustery winter evenings in Moveen, I provided only some little relief from habit and routine, what Samuel Beckett had identified years before as “the cancer of time.” I was not so interesting as I was something, anything, other than the known thing.

But today, the easier communications become, the easier it becomes not to communicate. The more rapidly we travel to the ends of the earth, the more readily we avoid our nearest neighbors.

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