Where streams of whiskey are flowing.

Notes on the rapture.

One thing I cannot get used to here is that the driver's seat is on the right of a car. I am down with traffic coming on the left side of a road (the "LOOK RIGHT" markings painted on the pavement at crosswalks help), and perhaps if I were spending any time in cars myself, I'd get used to the seat positions, too. But as it is, I look into the window of an oncoming car, and the person in the lefthand seat is turned around getting something from the backseat, and I almost scream, "Look out! Look out! Look out!" before I remember the real deal.

This is especially frustrating in moments like the other morning, when, crossing in a crosswalk and with a walk signal, I was nearly run down by a taxi trying to catch the yellow light. (He had missed by a long shot.) I tried to glare at him, but what seemed to be the driver's seat was empty, and I thought, "Well no wonder: the rapture has come at last, and half the cars are now without drivers."

I take that back.

About ten days ago, I was suggesting that the new-fangled modern exhibitions cannot match the sites themselves. To some extent, I still believe that, but yesterday I saw an exhibition that complicated my earlier thoughts.

This is the Yeats exhibition at the National Library of Ireland. You can visit an online version of the show here, and it is worth doing, whether you can get to the actual show or not.

The exhibition features an array of W. B. Yeats's printed books, manuscripts, typescripts, and photographs. When you enter, there is a small room made of screens, where an audio track plays recordings of his poems, read by the likes of Seamus Heaney and Sinead O'Connor while slides of the text and accompanying images grace the screens. There are four films about Yeats's life and work, featuring images of Ireland, his notebooks, and commentary from notable scholars. There are well-presented cases of copies of his books, manuscripts of his poems and letters, pages from his occult notebooks, photographs of his family. There is a giant-sized replica of The Tower, perhaps his most important book, that you can walk inside of. In there you find a sort of family tree for the poems, tracing them from manuscript to periodical publication to other books where they were published and finally to The Tower--and of course all these stages are represented by reproductions of the artifacts in question.

It really is a marvel, an example of how multi-modal presentation can be put to excellent use.

And although it has been up for a couple of years, it got an ebullient mention in this weekend's NYTimes.

So I revise what I said before. Done well, these exhibitions do not take away from "the things themselves," but give you a new excitement about what you are seeing.

Does it get better than this?

Right now, I am sitting on a bench, looking out at the college park here at Trinity College in Dublin. If I had not consulted my map, I would have called it the cricket pitch, because it is right next to the rugby pitch, and most days there are cricket games in process here. Just now, one has wrapped up, and the players are changing into drier clothes and making their way to the pub that is the top floor of the next-door pavilion--they call the pub "the Pav"--and where there is an array of outdoor tables for taking your pint.

It turns out Joyce was right, and the cricket bats really do say, "pock, pock." I am always struck by those moments, where I find that something I am seeing or experiencing for the first time really does look or sound just like it does in some work of art. (I felt this way when I first got to Hong Kong, and I found that the mountains there do look like the Chinese ink paintings--and so different from the mountains I had seen in North America.)

Earlier this morning, I had my head immersed in typescripts, trying to figure out at what stage various textual changes were made. It is like detective work, in a way, with some of the glamor and all of the drudgery. But also the moments of "AHA!" which I live for.

But not right now. Right now I am enjoying the sun on my face. And I am enjoying enjoying the sun on my face, because in South Carolina in July, there would be few things I would enjoy less. But here? The last days have been cloudy and rainy, but today there is suddenly blue, up there, in the sky. The wind is blowing, the air is cool, and despite wearing a couple of layers, I am happy for the warmth from the sky. Out in the park there is a young couple running barefoot in the grass, laughing hysterically at something, and also a woman in a bright white skirt walking with her toddler, and a little ways away, people lying on the grass, perhaps feeling the same way I do about the sun.

So what could be better?

Now that I think of it? If I were over at the Pav, with a pint in my hand. So on that note, . . . .