As the westbound coach hugs a high hedge of fuchsia, O'Connor steers slowly past an eastbound lorry. Her sentence is flat, but her voice is lilting. Lyricism, a sense of the double-edged power and beauty of the music of words, overflows into the everyday patterns of life. The U of C travelers hear it when, in groups of four or six, they are dinner guests in Kerry homes, and their hosts talk of their daily lives as farmers, office workers, chef, homemakers, and students. They hear it in a passerby's greeting, in the jigs and ballads of a smoke-filled pub, the brogue of a traditional storyteller.
Lyricism is a constant in a nation of contradictions and conflicts.
Minutes from the Writers Museum and the Abbey and Gate theaters, the Gresham is also steps away from a McDonald's, a Burger King, and an Internet cafe. An already brisk pace quickens to double time. Museums, churches, a performance of Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband . Once inside the dark cubicle, where the fragile illuminated Gospels produced in the ninth century by the monks of Iona are displayed like Snow White under glass, it's hard to get close enough to see. With a barrel-vaulted ceiling, high wooden shelves marked with call letters of gold, and the rich leather smell of old books, the Long Room is a bibliophile's dream.