B

y way of introduction, I feel obligated to inform 
you, the reader, that I’m not really quite sure how 
to go about writing this — the knowledge of which 

might mean, conversely, that in some way you’ll be more 
sure of how to go about reading it. The first unforeseen 
(though obviously easily foreseeable) challenge is that I 
wasn’t exactly just sitting around looking for things to do. 
In fact, it took me about six weeks to find a few spare 
hours in which to work, which led to the production of 
this essay’s first draft in a spurt of frenetic, caffeine-
fueled typing in a German cafe, where I vainly hoped that 
with my few days respite before I went on the road again 
I might be able to sputter out a few thousand words of 
genuine, semi-coherent writing that at least someone 
might deem worth reading. Not to mention that I feel 
as if this whole thing should probably be more than a 
catalogue or chronology, i.e., should have some sort of 
overarching thesis, raison d’être or “point,” the substance 
of which I’m really hoping I’ll discover as I go along. The 
second and only slightly less obvious difficulty is found 
in the necessity of presenting my trip as the intensely 
individual experience it was without simultaneously 
lapsing into excessive solipsism. Somehow, I need to 
be both authentic to my emotional memory and engage 
you in experiences which are not your own — all while 
scrupulously avoiding the irksome “look-at-all-the-cool-
things-I’m-doing” tone which would drive you to rapidly 
abandon reading the remainder. A regular Scylla and 
Charybdis, as you can see.

For those of you still here, I promise I’ll get to the 

actual point of the piece relatively soon. But first, I 
think it would be fruitful to talk a bit about myself in a 
more specific way. After all, most narratives featuring 
a nameless or nondescript protagonist about whom we 
know nothing tend to lead to a state of indifference or 
sink us into a mental sopor, with the notable exception 
of nameless characters to whom horrible things happen, 
who — at least for me — tend to induce a general sense 
of extrapolated existential dread. And in this context, 
it’s probably best to think of me, the author, as a mostly-
non-fictional character. Anyway, if you check the top 
of the page, you’ll notice that my name is Dayton Hare. 
I am a sophomore at the University of Michigan, where 
I’m a music composition major (and will soon add a 
second degree in English). With that in mind, more than 
anything else I am a composer, and I like (rather vainly, 
I suppose) to think of myself as young artist/intellectual. 
I love books (the type you can hold), history, poetry and 
modernist literature. I love the electric charge of the air 
before rain, and the smell of soil after. I like long walks on 
the beach as much as anyone, though I find the inevitable 
accumulation of sand on one’s feet to be incredibly 
irritating.

My flight was on 19 June, from Atlanta. My fellow 

traveler was my younger sister Fiona, who was traveling 
to Europe to study Shakespearean acting in London, just 
as I was going to study music and composition in Paris. 
During a layover in Washington D.C., we coincidentally 
ran into a mutual friend of ours from high school, 
who was travelling to Morocco to study Arabic. Small 
world, really. We boarded the plane in late evening, and 
somewhere over the North Atlantic I watched the warm 
heat of a parabolic dawn consume the thousands of stars 
burning coldly above us.

Our first sight of Europe was the deep green coast of 

Ireland as we descended toward Dublin (it turns out, 
after all, that the term “Emerald Isle” is not a misnomer). 
The first indication that we weren’t in America anymore 
came in the form of the airport signs, which were written 
first in Irish and second in English. The Irish capital itself 
was cool and grey, and people hurried about incessantly. 
My sister and I joined them, eager to see as much of the 
city as possible before we had to fly to Rome in a couple 
of days. Strolling through the city, we quickly fell into 
the local habit of jaywalking recklessly. I found myself 
casually wondering if dashing across the road involved 
the same sort of collective rebellion of spirit as led to 
the Irish War of Independence of 1919 (though I quickly 
dismissed this as a mind-boggling oversimplification and 
an idea that was frankly rather stupid). Later in the day, 
we visited the Garden of Remembrance, constructed as a 
memorial to “all those who gave their lives in the cause of 
Irish Freedom.”

To me Dublin has always been the city of Joyce, and 

this wasn’t changed by visiting it. We came across a statue 
of the author on the street, and I posed dramatically with 
him as my sister snapped a photo. I love Joyce, and I’ve 
always felt a certain empathetic connection to him, as if 
we were similar in some way (a bit conceited, I know). 
Perhaps it’s just the fact that we were both youths of 
artistic temperament growing up in places we felt to be 
culturally oppressive in some way (in his case, Ireland; in 
mine, the American South). I don’t really know why, but 
I’m ceaselessly fascinated with him. Part of the reason for 
these sorts of journeys always seems to be that of self-
discovery, and I suppose that this Joycean encounter 
contributes to that as much as anything. It’s not as if I 
experienced some sort of dramatic artistic or personal 

revelation à la Beckett-in-mother’s-bedroom, but walking 
in the same place as an artist I’ve long admired walked, 
inhabiting the same space he inhabited, separated only by 
temporality, made that particular part of my identity feel 
more connected or “real.” Or perhaps that’s all nonsense. 
I’ve always considered the “self” to be relatively 
unknowable, but my compulsive need to acquire concrete 
knowledge always drives me to try to make sense out 
of these sorts of things, even when I can cognitively 
acknowledge that it’s probably a waste of time.

After seeing Joyce’s statue, we visited the Dublin 

Writers Museum, which was next door to a gallery of 
Irish art. Walking through the museum after a peek at the 
gallery, we saw first editions and manuscripts and letters 
— the lot. Before leaving the city, we strolled across the 
grounds of Trinity College, gazed at the illuminated 
pages of the Book of Kells, breathed in the paper-laden 
aroma of Trinity’s library, became lost no fewer than four 
times and unexpectedly consumed the spiciest Thai food 
either of us had ever encountered. By the evening of the 
second day, we were on a plane bound for a very different 
city, one that — like Dublin — was allegedly founded by a 
ship-borne people, but has a history nearly two millennia 
longer and a cultural footprint felt across continents.

Before we left for Rome, we took a final walk through 

the city. We strolled around St. Stephen’s Green, past St. 
Patrick’s Cathedral (the Irish are remarkably Catholic, 
aren’t they?), down through the Temple Bar district and 
across the river. As we passed over a bridge, I looked 
down at the waters of the River Liffey. The flowing mass 
was too active to form a mirror — I could see nothing of 
myself. I thought it a pity. What a great metaphor for self-
reflection that would have made.

Wednesday, October 26, 2016 // The Statement
6B

An American in Dublin

by Dayton Hare, Daily Arts Writer

ILLUSTRATION BY ELISE HAADSMA

