INTRODUCTION

The Ethnography of
Everyday Life

THE CENTER FOR the Ethnography of Everyday Life at the University of Michigan invited me to present at their recent conference, “Doing Documentary Work: Life, Letters and the Field.”

Where I come from, upstream on the Huron from smart Ann Arbor, we rarely offload words like ethnography unless we are appearing before the zoning board of appeals or possibly trying to avoid jury duty. All the same, I thanked the organizers and said I would be happy, etc., honored, of course, and marked the dates and times in my diary.

To be on the safe side, I looked it up—ethnography—and it says, “The branch of anthropology that deals with the description of various racial and cultural groups of people.” And anthropology—I looked that up too—is “the study of the origin, the behavior, and the physical, social and cultural development of human beings.”

Anthology—“a gathering of literary pieces, a miscellany, an assortment or catalogue”—is on the same page as anthropology. It comes from the Greek, as students are told, for “gathering flowers.” As the man in that movie about the big fat wedding says, everything comes from the Greek for something else.

Dictionaries are like that—you go in for a quick hit of ethnography and come out with flowers by the bunch. Two pages east and you’ve got Antigone, “the daughter of Oedipus and Jocasta, in Greek mythology, who performed funeral rites over her brother’s body in defiance of the king” at Thebes. That ancient city’s on the same page as theater and theatre, which have several definitions all derived from the Greek “to watch.” Think of “the milieu of actors and playwrights.” Think Mrs. Patrick Campbell. Think Sophocles.

At the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, just last week, a new version of Antigone called The Burial at Thebes opened to great reviews in the Irish papers. One commentator claimed that Creon the king was like President George W. Bush, caught in a conflict he’d a hand in making. How’s that for ethnography and everyday? How’s that for life, letters, and the field?

I avoided the quagmire of milieu, suspect as we are lately of anything French, but looked up human and human beings and got what you’d guess, but came across humic, which sent me to humus, which has to do with “a layer of soil that comes from the decay of leaves and other vegetation and which contains valuable plant food.” It is a twin of the Latin word—because everything in our house came from Latin, except for the Kyrie—for soil, earth.

Which put me in mind of a book I’d been reading by Robert Pogue Harrison, The Dominion of the Dead, in which he speaks about our “humic density”—we human beings, shaped out of earth, fashioned out of dirt, because we are primally bound to the ground our shelters and buildings and monuments rise out of and our dead are buried in. Everything—architecture, history, religion—“rooted” in the humus of the home place and to the stories and corpses that are buried there.

Thus was I shown, in my first days in West Clare years ago, the house and haggard, hay barn and turf-shed, cow cabins and out-offices, gateposts, stone walls, fields and wells and ditches, forts and gaps, church and grave vault, names and dates in stone—all the works and days of hands that belonged to the people that belonged to me, all dead now, dead and gone back to the ground out of which arose these emblements of humic density.

The awareness of death that defines human nature is inseparable from—indeed it rises from—our awareness that we are not self-authored, that we follow in the footsteps of the dead. Everywhere one looks across the spectrum of human cultures one finds the foundational authority of the predecessor. . . . Whether we are conscious of it or not we do the will of the ancestors: our commandments come to us from their realm; their precedents are our law; we submit to their dictates, even when we rebel against them. Our diligence, hardihood, rectitude, and heroism, but also our folly, spite, rancor, and pathologies, are so many signatures of the dead on the contracts that seal our identities. We inherit their obsessions; assume their burdens; carry on their causes; promote their mentalities, ideologies, and very often their superstitions; and very often we die trying to vindicate their humiliations.

—The Dominion of the Dead, pages ix–x, Robert Pogue Harrison

Isn’t that just like people? Ethnographically speaking? Or anthropologically? To think of the place where their ancients lived and worked, fought, believed, and are buried as sacred, central to their own identity.

So we’re back to burials again—Antigone and Thebes. Creon and Bush. Do you suppose that humus is good for flowers?

Such is the trouble with the everyday—one thing leads to another. You start out with ethnography and end up with flowers, like the paperwhite narcissus my true love grows every Christmas from bulbs she buries in a kitchen pot, or the crocuses that press through the litter of old leaves, pine needles, melting snow, and warming soil every year in April up here at the lake. The everyday, predictable, measurable truth assumes a routine that we think we can study: how the seasons change, the moon runs through its phases, the sun rises earlier every day. “April showers,” we say, “red sky at morning.” Monday begets Tuesday, which in turn begets . . . well, you get it. We make our plans upon such reliable sciences. “Home by Friday, with the help of God,” I tell my darling on the way out the door.

MAYBE YOU WANT to know what I said at the conference?

I said it looked like “a paradigm shift.” (They were paying me a handsome honorarium.) I said it looked like a paradigm shift, from a sense of holy ground and grounding, to a kind of rootlessness—spiritually, ethnographically, anthropologically speaking, humanity-wise. At which point in the proceedings I removed from my bag and placed upon the table by the lectern from which I was holding forth, a golf-bag cremation urn. Molded, no doubt, out of some new-age resin or high-grade polymer, it stands about fourteen inches high and looks like everyone’s idea of the big nut-brown leather bag with plump pockets and a plush towel and precious memories in which “Dad” or “Grandpa” or “Good Old [insert most recently deceased golf-buddy’s nickname]” would have kept his good old golf clubs. The bottom of the golf-bag urn is fashioned to look like the greensward of a well-maintained fairway. So the whole thing looks like a slice of golf heaven. There is even a golf ball resting beside the base of the bag, waiting for the erstwhile golfer to chip it up for an easy putt. The thing is hollow, the better to accommodate the two hundred-some cubic centimeters, give or take, most cremated human beings will amount to.

I confess that the idea of the urn only came to me at the last moment, because I wanted to see the looks on their faces. It’s a character flaw, based upon my own lack of scholastic pedigree. Except for an honorary doctorate in humanities from the university I never managed to graduate from—though the Dear knows I paid for many classes—I hold no degree. I’m not bachelor, master, or doctor of anything, and though I was “certified” in mortuary science by a regionally respected university, a battery of state and national board exams, and the completion of a requisite apprenticeship, I’m self-conscious about standing before a room full of serious students and scholars. It is this fear—surely every human has it—of being exposed as a fraud that makes one eager to supply a diversion. Thus the urn: if I could not earn their respect, I’d . . . well, never mind.

Still, I wanted to see the looks on their faces when I presented, as an article of documentary consequence, as an anthropological artifact, as a postmodern relic of a species that had accomplished pyramids, the Taj Mahal, and Newgrange, the ethnographically denatured and, by the way, chemically inert, plastic golf-bag-shaped cremation urn. It’s one of a kind. It came from a catalogue. There’s also one that looks like a pair of cowboy boots—a “companion” urn for “pardners”—and one that looks like a duck decoy for hunters or possibly naturalists: variations on the theme of molded plastics. So I wanted to tell them about the paradigm shift that it signified.

I came up burying Presbyterians and Catholics, devout and lapsed, born-again and backslidden Baptists, Orthodox Christians, an occasional Zen Buddhist, and variously observant Jews. For each of these sets, there were infinite subsets. We had right old Calvinists who only drank single malts and were all good Masons and were mad for the bagpipes, just as we had former Methodists who worked their way up the Reformation ladder after they married into money or made a little killing in the market. We had Polish Catholics and Italian ones, Irish and Hispanic and Byzantine, and Jews who were Jews in the way some Lutherans are Lutheran—for births and deaths and first marriages.

My late father, himself a funeral director, schooled me in the local orthodoxies and their protocols as I have schooled my sons and daughter who work with me. There was a kind of comfort, I suppose, in knowing exactly what would be done with you, one’s ethnic and religious identities having established long ago the fashions and the fundamentals for one’s leave-taking. And while the fashions might change, the fundamental ingredients for a funeral were the same—someone who has quit breathing forever, some others to whom it apparently matters, and someone else who stands between the quick and dead and says something like, “Behold, I show you a mystery.”

“An act of sacred community theatre,” Dr. Thomas Long, writer, thinker, and theologian, calls this “transporting” of the dead from this life to the next. “We move them to a further shore. Everyone has a part in this drama.” The dead get to the grave or fire or tomb whilst the living get to the edge of a life they must learn to live without them. Ours is a species that deals with death (the idea of the thing) by dealing with our dead (the thing itself).

Late in the twentieth century, there was some trending toward the more homegrown doxologies. Everyone was into the available “choices.” We started doing more cremations—it made good sense. Folks seemed less “grounded” than their grandparents, more “portable,” “divisible,” more “scattered” somehow. We got into balloon releases and homing pigeons done up as doves to signify the flight of the dead fellow’s soul toward heaven. “Bridge Over Troubled Water” replaced “How Great Thou Art.” And if Paul’s Letter to the Romans or the Book of Job was replaced by Omar Khayyam or Emily Dickinson, what harm? “After great pain, a formal feeling comes,” rings as true as any sacred text. A death in the family is, as Miss Emily describes it: “First—Chill—then Stupor—then the letting go.”

Amidst all the high fashions and fashion blunders, the ritual wheel that worked the space between the living and the dead still got us where we needed to go. It made room for the good laugh, the good cry, and the power of faith brought to bear on the mystery of mortality. The dead were “processed” to their final dispositions with a pause sufficient to say that their lives and their deaths truly mattered to us. The broken circle within the community of folks who shared blood or geography or belief with the dead was closed again through this “acting out our parts,” as Reverend Long calls it. Someone brought the casseroles, someone brought the prayers, someone brought a shovel or lit the fire, everyone was consoled by everyone else. The wheel that worked the space between the living and the dead ran smoothly.

Lately I’ve been thinking that the wheel is broken or gone a long way off the track or must be reinvented every day. The paradigm is shifting. What with distanced communities of faith and family, the script has changed from the essentially sacred to the essentially silly. We mistake the ridiculous for the sublime.

Take Batesville Casket Company, for example. They make caskets and urns and wholesale them to funeral homes all over the globe. Their latest catalogue, called “Accessories,” includes suggested “visitation vignettes”—the stage arranged not around Cross or Crescent or Star of David but around one of Batesville’s “life-symbols” caskets featuring interchangeable corner hardware. One “life-symbol” looks like a rainbow trout jumping from the corners of the hardwood casket, and for dearly departed gardeners, there is one with little plastic potted mums. There is the “sports dad” vignette done up like a garage with beer logos, team pennants, hoops, and hockey skates and, of course, a casket that looks a little like a jock locker gone horizontal. There’s one for motorcyclists and the much-publicized “Big Mama’s Kitchen,” with its faux stove, kitchen table, and apple pie for the mourners to share with those who call. Instead of Methodists or Muslims, we are golfers now; gardeners, bikers, and dead bowlers. The bereaved are not so much family and friends or coreligionists as fellow hobbyists and enthusiasts. And I have become less the funeral director and more the memorial caddy of sorts, getting the dead out of the way and the living assembled within a theatre that is neither sacred nor secular but increasingly absurd—a triumph of accessories over essentials, of stuff over substance, gimmicks over the genuine. The dead are downsized or disappeared or turned into knickknacks in a kind of funereal karaoke.

Consider the case of Peter Payne, dead at forty-four of brain cancer. His wife arranged for his body to be cremated without witness or rubric, his ashes placed in the golf-bag urn, the urn to be placed on a table in one of our parlors with his “real life”—which is to say, “life-size” golf bag standing beside it for their son and daughter and circle of friends to come by for a look. And if nobody said, “Doesn’t he look natural?” several commented on how much he looked like, well, his golf bag. The following day, the ensemble was taken to the church, where the minister, apparently willing to play along, had some things to say about “life being like a par-three hole with plenty of sand traps and water hazards”—to wit, all too short and full of trouble. And heaven was something like a “19th Hole,” where, after “finishing the course,” those who “played by the rules” and “kept an honest score” were given their “trophies.” Then those in attendance were invited to join the family at the clubhouse of Mystic Creek Golf Course for lunch and a little commemorative boozing. There is already talk of a Peter Payne Memorial Golf Tournament next year. A scholarship fund has been established to send young golfers to PGA training camp. Some of his ashes will be scattered in the sand trap of the par-five hole on the back nine with the kidney-shaped green and the dogleg right. The rest will remain, forever and ever, perpetual filler for the golf-bag urn.

Whether this is indeed a paradigm shift, the end of an era, or, as Robert Pogue Harrison suggests, an “all too human failure to meet the challenges of modernity,” is anyone’s guess. But we are nonetheless required, as he insists, to choose “an allegiance—either to the posthuman, the virtual, and the synthetic, or to the earth, the real and the dead in their humic densities.”

“So, which will it be?” I posed rhetorically to the audience (which seemed oddly fixed upon the objet de mort). “The golf bag urn?” (read posthuman, virtual, and synthetic) “or some humus—the ground and graveyard, village, nation, place or faith—the nitty-gritty real earth in which human roots link the present to the past and future?”

They looked a little blankly at me, as if I’d held up five fingers and asked them what the square root of Thursday was. There was some shifting in seats, some clearing of throats. I thought I might have numbed them with the genius of it or damaged them in some nonspecific way.

I thought about wrapping up with a little joke about a widow who brings her cheapskate husband’s ashes home, pours them out on the kitchen table, and begins to upbraid him for all those things she asked for but he never gave her—the mink coat, the convertible, etc.—but thought better of it and closed instead with an invitation to engage in a little Q & A on these and any other themes they might like to pursue. A man in the second row, whose eyes had widened when I produced the urn and who had not blinked or closed his mouth since the thing appeared, raised his hand to ask, “Is there anyone in there?”

“Why, no, no, of course not, no,” I assured him.

There was a collective sigh, a sudden flash of not-quite-knowing smiles, and then the roar of uneasy silence, like a rush of air returned to the room.

The director of the Center for the Ethnography of Everyday Life hurriedly rose to thank me for “a thought-provoking presentation,” led the assembled in polite applause, and announced that the buffet luncheon was ready and waiting in a room across the hall. Except for a man who wanted to discuss his yet-to-be-patented “water-reduction method” of body disposition, there was no further intercourse between the assembly and me.

It’s only now, months later, the conference come and gone, the kindly stipend paid and spent, that it occurs to me what I should have said.

What I should have said is that ethnography seems so perilous just now, no less the everyday; that “life and letters and the field” seem littered more than ever with the wounded and the dead, the raging and the sad. That ethnicity, formerly a cause for celebration, now seems an occasion for increasing caution. That ethnic identity—those ties by which we are bound to others of our kind by tribe and race, language and belief, geography and history, costume and custom and a hundred other measures—seems lately less a treasure, more a scourge.

WHEN I BEGAN this book, I had in mind something that would help my family reconnect to our little history as Irish Americans, something that would resonate with other hyphenated types who’ve come from every parish in the world. I wanted the names and the records kept—a text my grandchildren, not yet born, might dip into someday for their own reasons. Something like Roots for the freckled and redheaded set, the riverdancing and flash-tempered descendants of immigrants—the seven million “willing” Irish men and women who have crossed the Atlantic in the last four hundred years, seeking a future in this New World that had been denied to them in the Old. From the first Scots-Irish, tired of the tithes and rents in Ulster in the seventeenth century—Davy Crockett’s people, westward pressing, sturdy and curious—to the hundreds of thousands of oppressed Catholics in the eighteenth century who would fight in our revolution and help to shape our nation, like the man with my name, from South Carolina, who signed the Declaration of Independence; to the million Famine Irish, sick with hunger, fever, and want in the nineteenth century, one of whom, my great-great-grandfather, came and returned, and another, my great-grandfather, came to stay; to the rising and falling tides of Irish who washed ashore here in the twentieth century, building our roads, working our Main Streets, filling our senates and legislatures, rectories, schools, and universities; to the sons and daughters of friends in Moveen who left home in the 1970s and 1980s and 1990s—Anne Murray and her sister Kay, a couple of the Carmodys, Downses and O’Sheas. They are still going out to America, although now they come and go as they please on 747s that every day fly over Moveen on their way to and from the airport at Shannon. Ultimatum has become an option. American Wakes have become bon-voyage parties as the young in West Clare become, like the young in Michigan, working tourists in a smaller world full of portable opportunities and multiple possibilities.

By the time Alex Haley’s Roots was published in 1976, I’d been back and forth to Ireland three times. Haley’s hunger for knowing and reconstructing and reconnecting with the past was one I’d got a whiff of in my early travels. When the TV series the book inspired was aired in January 1977, I watched with a hundred thirty million other Americans who, thanks to Haley’s gifts, saw, in the struggles of his family, something related to their own. For white Americans, it humanized blacks in a way that federal laws, however just and long overdue, had failed to do. For African Americans, it ennobled their struggle in a hostile world by connecting them to a formerly untold past.

When the African held his infant son, Kunta Kinte, up to the firmament and spoke his name into the dark face of creation, I understood the power of naming and keeping track of things, why all holy books begin with a litany of “begats,” and how much each of our personal stories owes to the stories of our families and clans, our kind and kin. Second only to the forced migration of the African slave trade, the tide of Famine and post-Famine Irish marked the largest single wave of immigration in U.S. history.

SO, I WANTED a book that honored those who stayed and those who went, to bridge some of the distance that always swells between people who “choose” a different path, or find some footing in a life with few choices. I wanted to understand the man who left, the better to understand the man who returned to Moveen, to understand the ones who went between and who would follow after.

I wanted something chatty and jaunty like a good night’s talk. Something that would find its market among even a fraction of the forty-some-million Americans alive today who trace their place back to the thirty-two thousand-square-mile island in the sea at the westernmost edge of Europe.

My agent and publishers oughtn’t to be faulted for thinking of a kind of travel memoir, something with a little something for everyone, something that would earn back its advance and then some. Something that would offset the losses on poetry. Truth told, it’s what I was hoping for, too.

The brother (about whom more anon), ever the raconteur, suggested at the outset a regimen of weekly audiences with himself and tendered Wednesdays with Patrick as a working title. “Or maybe Paddy—you know, for the folksy crowd—like that Paddy whiskey, easy sipping with a little bite. And maybe Thursdays, Tom. Yes, Thursdays with Paddy. That’s just the t’ing.” And the truth is I’d have no problem with that. He’s a great man in all ways with a skeptic’s temperament, a heart of gold, and a “fierce big brainbox,” as Martin Roche once said about J. J. McMahon, our neighbor in West Clare.

I wanted it all to be a gift, in thanksgiving for the gift that had been given me, of Ireland and the Irish, the sense of connection, and the family I found there and the house they all came from that was left to me.

SEPTEMBER 11 CHANGED all of that. The book I first imagined was no longer possible. Just as our sense of safety here, protected by oceans and the globe’s largest arsenal of weapons and resources, was forever shaken, irreparably damaged by the horrors of that day, so too was the sense that ethnicity is always and only quaint and benign.

Lost too was the luxury of isolation and purposeful ignorance of the larger world of woes, a taste for which I’d acquired in my protected suburban youth and overindulged throughout my adulthood—fattening, as Americans especially do, on our certainty that it will all be taken care of by whoever’s in charge.

I remember telling prospective tourists, fearful of what they’d heard about the “Troubles” in Ireland—the last century’s longest-running war in Western Europe—not to worry about a thing. Belfast and Derry were distant concerns, small towns in a tiny province—“little more,” I’d assure them, “than a bar fight in Escanaba or Munising.” I’d acquired the Irish gift for strategic understatement, too.

The day that terrorists bombed embassies in Africa, was it?—killing dozens or hundreds, I couldn’t say—I was shopping in Kilrush for kitchen things at Brews and Gleeson’s, certain that the troubles really didn’t concern me and that out by Dunlicky the mackerel would be plentiful and the walk to the sea would do me good, and nothing could be better than fresh fish and tea.

So maybe what I should have said is that ethnography, which formerly seemed a parlor game, seems more a dangerous science now, especially “the ethnography of everyday life,” because life, everyday life, here in the opening decade of the new millennium, constantly obscures, daily nullifies, and relentlessly confounds the needful work of such inquiry. The subgroup we were about to study is suddenly removed or written off by the first drafts of a history that our all-day-everyday news cycle proclaims.

“A Decade After Massacres, Rwanda Outlaws Ethnicity,” proclaims the headline in the New York Times on April 8, 2004. Marc Lacey reports from the capital, Kigali:

This country, where ethnic tensions were whipped up into a frenzy of killing, is now trying to make ethnicity a thing of the past. There are no Hutu in the new Rwanda. There are no Tutsi either. The government, dominated by the minority Tutsi, has wiped out the distinction by decree.

Ethnicity has already been ripped out of schoolbooks and rubbed off government identity cards. Government documents no longer mention Hutu or Tutsi, and the country’s newspapers and radio stations, tightly controlled by the government, steer clear of the labels as well.

It is not just considered bad form to discuss ethnicity in the new Rwanda. It can land one in jail. Added to the penal code is a crime of “divisionism,” a nebulous offense that includes speaking too provocatively about ethnicity.

As elsewhere, there are the politically incorrect.

A Tutsi woman, who was raped in 1994 by so many Hutu militiamen in the village of Taba that she lost count, said she has difficulty interacting comfortably with Hutu.

“I don’t trust them,” said the woman, who, identified only as J. J., testified about her ordeal before the international tribunal in Rwanda.

Tutsi and Hutu—such neighborly words—equal in syllables and vowel sounds, trochees and pleasantly fricative “t’s”: who’d ever guess that they accounted for eight hundred thousand deaths in a hundred days a decade ago, most by machete, that the rest of the world largely ignored.

While marking another anniversary of the Rwandan genocide this year, we are avoiding naming what is happening in Sudan’s Darfur region as “genocide.” That particular noun requires verbs—by international convention, something remedial would have to be done—whereas atrocity or ethnic cleansing leaves us options. The systematic rape, pillage, and slaughter of tribal Africans by Arab Janjaweed militia, armed by the Sudanese government, are, like the atrocities of the twentieth century—Armenians in Turkey, Jews
of the Holocaust, Cambodians, Kurds, Bosnians, Nigerians, Bengalis—all lamentable mostly after the fact.

Asked whether the recent run of genocides might finally get it to “stick in people’s minds” that we’ve responsibilities, Samantha Power, author of A Problem from Hell, replies, “I think we tell ourselves, though, that that was the product of peculiar circumstances. ‘Oh, that’s Africa, you know, the tribes, they do that.’ ‘It’s the Balkans, this stuff happens in the Balkans.’ There’s a way that we otherize [my italics] circumstances that challenge our universal premises.” (Atlantic Unbound Interviews, March 14, 2003)

How do we otherize our fellow humans? How do we mistake them for something other than our kind? In what ways has our ethnicity poisoned the well of our humanity? Why must our religions so miscalculate our gods? If there is only one God, as all Muslims, Christians, and Jews believe, then isn’t the One we believe in one and the same? If there is no God, aren’t we only off by one? And if there are many, aren’t there plenty to go around? In the wake of that godawful September, after bombing the bejaysus out of Afghanistan, after bombing, invading, and occupying Iraq, a book about the forty shades of green I’d encountered driving around the Ring of Kerry seemed a little like a golf-bag urn—plastic, silly, curious, but idiotic. All I saw was forty shades of gray, and in each of them still forty more.

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. The more communing we do, the more elusive a sense of community seems. We are each encouraged to make individual choices, to seek personal saviors, singular experiences, our own particular truth. We make enemies of strangers and strangers of friends and wonder why we feel alone in the world.

Americans seem terribly perplexed at all the hatred of us in the world. Where, we wonder, are all those happy Iraqis who were supposed to greet us with smiles and flowers after we had liberated them? Where have all the flowers gone? Anthology? Antigone?

In his unstintingly titled How the Irish Saved Civilization, historian Thomas Cahill comments on page 6 on the tendency of one “civilization” to miss the point of an “other”:

To an educated Englishman of the last century, for instance, the Irish were by their very nature incapable of civilization. “The Irish,” proclaimed Benjamin Disraeli, Queen Victoria’s beloved prime minister, “hate our order, our civilization, our enterprising industry, our pure religion [Disraeli’s father had abandoned Judaism for the Church of England]. This wild, reckless, indolent, uncertain and superstitious race have no sympathy with the English character. Their ideal of human felicity is an alternation of clannish broils and coarse idolatry [i.e. Catholicism]. Their history describes an unbroken circle of bigotry [!] and blood.” The venomous racism and knuckleheaded prejudice of this characterization may be evident to us, but in the days of “dear old Dizzy,” as the queen called the man who had presented her with India, it simply passed for indisputable truth.

If this sounds a little like the conventional wisdom of the day, the policy and approved text on our “enemies in the war on terror,” then perhaps we should be on the lookout for “venomous racism and knuckleheaded prejudice” of our own.

Cahill goes on to make his case of how Irish monks and scribes kept the candles burning and the texts illumined through the Dark Ages and recivilized and re-Christianized Europe from west to east in what he calls a “hinge” of history. Cahill’s “hinges of history”—he has since done for the Jews and the Greeks what he did for the Irish—sound more than a little like what the German existentialist Karl Jaspers called the “Axial Age,” from 800 to 200 BC, when most of religious thought was formed, an age marked by violence and upheaval.

Maybe it is time we looked to Ireland again for some clues to the nature of our ethnic imbroglios, our jihads and holy wars, and to how we might learn to live peaceably in the world with our “others.” Surely the Shiite and Sunni of Iraq have something to learn from the Catholics and Protestants of Belfast and from the citizens of the Republic of Ireland. For here is a nation with a history of invasion, occupation, oppression, tribal warfare, religious fervor, ethnic cleansing, sectarian violence, and the tyrannies of churchmen, statesmen, thugs, and hoodlums. And yet it thrives on a shaky peace, religious convictions, rich cultural resources, and the hope of its citizens. It is a kind of miracle of civilization—where the better angels of the species have bested the bad. Such things could be contagious.

ON AUGUST 28, 1931, W. B. Yeats wrote “Remorse for Intemperate Speech,” a line from which this book borrows for one of its chapters and organizing principles. “Out of Ireland have we come./Great hatred, little room,/Maimed us at the start.” Yeats had witnessed and worked at the birth of a new Irish nation, had served as a Free State senator, and, after winning the Nobel Prize for literature, was at sixty-five the country’s public man of letters. An Anglo-Irishman who had ditched his people’s High Church Christianity in favor of swamis and Theosophists and his wife’s dabbling in the occult, he was likewise deeply immersed in the fledgling nation’s Celtic twilight, and torn between the right-wing politics of between-wars Europe and the romantic, mystic past of Ireland. His poem confesses and laments that reason and breeding, imagination and good intention are trumped by what he called “a fanatic heart.” The remorse is real. Surely the age in which we live requires such self-examination. In a world made smaller by its benign and malevolent technologies, out of whatever country we have come, great hatred, little room, maims us at the start. Regardless of our heritage, we carry from our mothers’ wombs our own fanatic hearts.

IF THE BOOK I first had in mind was made more difficult by the ethnography of everyday life hereabouts, something Yeats wrote in a letter to Maud Gonne affords a kind of guidance. “Today I have one settled conviction ‘Create, draw a firm strong line & hate nothing whatever not even (the devil) if he be your most cherished belief—Satan himself’. I hate many things but I do my best, & once some fifteen years ago, for I think one whole hour, I was free from hate. Like Faust I said ‘stay moment’ but in vain. I think it was the only happiness I have ever known.”

The bookish habits of Michel de Montaigne ought likewise to be imitated. (Already I’ve become more tolerant!) The essai, as the sixteenth-century Frenchman named it, is less a certainty and more a search, an attempt at sense-making, a setting forth, as if in a boat of words, to see if language will keep the thought afloat; a testing of the air for what rings true, an effort at illuminating grays.

We are told he retired to his library at a certain age and made his way among its books, endeavoring to understand his species by examining himself. “Each man bears the whole of man’s estate,” he wrote, and figured humanity could be understood by the scrutiny of a single human. As it was easiest, he chose himself and began to look. He was among the first ethnographers of the everyday. Whereas Augustine gave us his Confessions, in Montaigne we get, as his present-day disciple Phillip Lopate says gorgeously, “more of the cat examining its fur.” We get his table fare and toilet habits, his favorite poets and his favorite books, what he thought about the sexes, his take on the weather. From the tiniest of details, he essays the real, the human, and the true.

THIS BOOK WAS begun in my home in Moveen, in the easy early months of 2001. It was shaped between funerals and family duties over the next two years in Milford and was finished over the late winter and early spring of 2004 in northern Michigan, at a home we have on Mullett Lake, a half-hour south of the Straits of Mackinac. In each location, the “cancer of time,” the duties and routine of the everyday follow something like Montaigne’s regimen. I wake early, make the coffee, read the e-mail and the New York Times online, check the Irish Times and Clare FM, cook up some Odlums Pinhead Oatmeal. “Aptly named,” my loved ones sometimes say. At 7:30, I listen to The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor on the radio, a kind of writerly morning office or book of days during which he says what happened on the date, lists the birthdays, reads a poem.

Our calendars, once full of feasts of virgins, martyrs, and confessors, now are crowded with unholy days. The day they struck our shining cities; the day we leveled theirs; the day they killed our innocents; the day we did the same to theirs. So to have a poem and some better news, every day, is no bad thing.

Yesterday was the day they put Galileo on trial for claiming that the earth revolved around the sun. “You can think it,” the pope told him, “just don’t say so out loud.” “E pur si muove . . . ,” the astronomer whispered, alas to no one in earshot.

And today is the birthday of Thomas Jefferson, born in 1743 in Virginia, we are told, and “though he had grown up with slaves, and later kept them himself, his first legislative act was a failed attempt to emancipate the slaves under his jurisdiction. He later said, ‘The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise . . . in tyranny. . . . The man must be a prodigy who can retain his . . . morals undepraved by such circumstances.’”

And it’s the birthday of Samuel Beckett, your “cancer of time” man, born on Good Friday in 1906 in a suburb of Dublin, who said of his childhood, “I had little talent for happiness.” In 1928, he left for Paris to become James Joyce’s acolyte. In 1937, he was stabbed in the chest by a pimp named Prudent. He visited his assailant in prison and when he asked the man why he had attacked him, Prudent replied, “Je ne sais pas, monsieur.” “I do not know, sir,” became a prominent refrain in Waiting for Godot, his most famous play—in which, most famously, nothing happens.

We do not know. Such is the dilemma of the everyday. We rummage among books and newspapers, watch the fire go to ash, pace the room, walk out into the day that’s in it, watch the snow give way to humus. The loons return. The first insuppressible flowers bloom. We find in our theatres and times, like Vladimir and Estragon, that life is waiting, killing time, holding to the momentary hope that whatever’s supposed to happen next is scheduled to occur—wars end, the last thin shelf of ice melts, and the lake is clear and blue, like the ocean we are always dreaming of crossing, we get it right, we make it home—if not today, then possibly tomorrow.

TL

April 13, 2004

Mullett Lake

Milford

Moveen West