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