The last time I was in Dublin, I was 15 years old – & crammed into a station wagon with my parents and eight very active siblings (including my then-youngest brother who was all of three weeks old). We were on our way home from a three-year stay in the UK, and were touring Ireland at the behest of my mother, who had Irish ancestry on her father’s side — and she had always wanted to see the country.

This Irish visit on our way home to the U.S. was obviously a bit more calm & considerably less stressful – but it still had a familial element, since we were reciprocating a Nanjing visit by my cousin Bryan and his wife Mary (see last January’s posting). We also took the opportunity to visit with another long-time relation — an 88-year-old, Dublin-based second-cousin-once-removed (yes, really!; we checked it out).

Sweny’s chemist shop

One of the things that made this visit very special, however, was Dublin’s obvious affinity for great writers. We had just missed Bloomsday – the celebration every year on June 16th when everyone celebrates the one day of activities described in James Joyce’s Ulysses. But the city nonetheless maintains a year-round Joycean awareness, and the folks seated next to us in the pub made sure we knew that Leopold Bloom had stopped in at Sweny’s, the apothecary across the street, on that day to purchase lemon soap.

Oscar Wilde memorial

We took it all in, visiting both the Dublin Writers’ Museum and the James Joyce Center. In the latter was a drawing of that same Sweny’s — by the artist Emma Byrne, and shown above — which was used in an illustrated publication of the work. Joyce was not the only Dublin writer of note, of course, & so we also visited Oscar Wilde’s (rather flamboyant!) memorial in Merrion Square – a tribute seemingly well attuned to his lifestyle. Another important literary stop was the Long Room of the Old Library at Trinity College, and a visit to see the Book of Kells – a lavishly illustrated work of the four Gospels produced by Irish monks early in the 9th Century.

Long Room of Old Library at Trinity College

I’m sure you must be thinking that I read Ulysses on this trip – but I have to admit to feeling just a little bit intimidated, and woefully unprepared (i.e., many believe that you need some academic training to tackle the 18 shifting-style episodes in that work, in order to understand what Joyce was trying to accomplish). So I made do with one of his very early — and I thought rather appropriately titled, for this visit — books: Dubliners. That collection of fifteen short stories (available free on Kindle) is on display in Sweny’s window…. and like many readers I found the last story (‘The Dead’) especially powerful; it definitely signaled the emergence of a major literary figure.