Portrait of a Writer as Pilgrim
by Elizabeth Solar
A writer’s imagination provides boundless geography to situate the worlds we create.
How much of our stories are the result of internal journeys, and how much is influenced by the travel of a more grounded kind? Does inspiration stem from where we come from? Where we settle? Or in the places we visit?
On a recent family trip to Ireland to celebrate the holidays, and explore our familial roots, I once again marveled on location, location, location in a writer’s life. It is no surprise the Emerald Isle has produced great writers like George Bernard Shaw, Samuel Beckett, William Yeats, James Joyce and Oscar Wilde.
Constant skies of grey, a persistent muddy season, and shrouds of mist envelop verdant hillsides and stretches of sheep and cow dotted landscape. It’s the type of melancholy weather that can keep you inside writing — dark, moody reflections, gallows humor — or drinking. Or both.
Walking along a moon-like terrain of The Burren, and watching locals indulge in a post-Christmas ritual swim outside the James Joyce Museum in the damp 30-degree weather, it is no surprise that so much Irish writing is filled with a mixture of stoicism, skepticism and whimsy. Even the architecture reflects a brooding, durable quality in the charcoal- smudged Georgian townhouses, and blackened edifices of churches, prisons and marketplaces.
A quiltwork of ashen walls, the height of your average 19th century male, built stone by stone during the great famine, dominate the idyllic countryside. Their ubiquitous presence serves as a reminder this fanciful handiwork served a dual purpose: to provide a pittance of income for the impoverished to provide for their starving families, while keeping them out of wealthy estate owners’ land. A sad and painful history, but not the entire story of this resilient rock.
I would be remiss not to mention the fierce beauty of the Atlantic, the bright blue, red and yellow front doors, bedecked in holiday greenery that welcome the weary traveler. The gentle ribbing, and easy camaraderie of the Irish people, and brilliant array of ugly Christmas sweaters on display in convivial local pubs. The charm of winding roads, heavenly baked goods, and bright colors flaunted by the tiny shops of Kilkenny.
Geography, like those inhabitants of it, is filled with contradictions, and delicious surprises. We can be influenced and inspired by it, and if we’re lucky, or thoughtful, not be completely bound to it.
In Merrion Square, home to many a scribe, sits a statue of Oscar Wilde. A genius and flamboyant wit, poet and playwright, Wilde was controversial in his day for (among other things) writing the dazzling novel of moral decay, “A Portrait of Dorian Gray. ” His colorful image - green and red smoking jacket, blue granite shoes, and jaunty slouch - smirks from atop a granite boulder in a lush corner of the park. It is the only public statue in Ireland rendered in such bright hues. Some things just can’t be seen in black and white.
Wilde assures me of the tragicomedy of life from wherever one hails, wherever one roams. I hear him dismiss any navel gazing as his sardonic gaze pierces my own.
“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." - Oscar Wilde
