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‘Proust has taught us that the memories we sit down to, that we select and seek, are false. Perhaps we might have suspected that, those of us who were reading Turgeniev when Proust's first volumes were coming out. The past blows up when it will, and cannot be commanded; but the tonic sharpness of its accidental visitations is a gift, a restitution to age for which no one would know how to pray, but which mus tnot go unthanked. And house-moving can stir a lively dust, bright motes throwing shafts of backward light; so all this healthy fussing out of UCD to Belfield and the suburbs turns some of us towards unsought remembrances. [...]’ (p.6.)
[...]
ohn Henry Newman, one of the Founding Fathers of that institution now called U.C.D., but which has had many names - a founding father of the Catholic University, also its brillian, difficult and self-dismissing servant, gave generations of us a prose style. Surely it is essential now to change the textbooks of First Arts English/ For one can grow old still trying not to echo that clarion-writing, through a long life in flight from “I look to a land both old and young ..” and the ensuing paragraph - inescapable. That, however, is merely a writer's problem, technical. Newman said for our founders some plain, true things. He seems to me to have sighted a final classification of truth when he wrote that “There is no crying demand for a Catholic Euclid or a Catholic Newton.” Any intelligent ten-year-old can see the exactitude of that - nor will he lose sight of it when he has become an undergraduate. (p.6.)
Sometimes I am asked what lectures and lecturers were like in my time. And turning over my surprisingly clear recollections under the two headings, I begin remembering that twice in the summer term of my first year the President sent for me, to tell me, with icy indifference, that my non-attendance at the lectures of Douglas Hyde and Agnes O’Farrelly might bar me from sitting for the First Arts examination in June. The first time I stood thus on Dr. Coffey’s carpet, I cannot ahve believed his cool pronouncement. [8]
Later refers to the ‘kindergarten of Agnes O’Farrelly’ - having previously been taught Irish proficiently at school. (p.9.)
Michael Tierney is ‘the gloomy Platonist from the West’ (p.8.)
‘From Austin Clarke, shy, unhappy, I suspect, in his first job - form that rapidly muttering, fresh-minded and always-in-flight young lectuer, the attentive - of which on my own terms I became one - could get light, and direction. He said striking things, when one could hear them. He was amusing and rude about essays - but once he actually said out loud in class that in one of mine he found “the outward sign of inward grace.” I have not forgotten either my pleasure or astonishment.’ (p.10.)
‘[...] I cannot look back at my time in UCD without saying that I took adult education, exact direction, from Professor Roger Chauviré. [..] Wit, clarity, reason, system, tolerance and gaiety - all these were the ground material of his addresses. He took literature into cold daylight; he cut it out clearly as an exact and exacting skill, a form of lovely science. Listening to Chauviré on French writing of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries I grew up. [...] to consider in French light Racine and Madame de Lafayette - or Ronsard or de Vigny as the chances of the programme might be - was to have summer in one's head, and to be quite cooly dazzled. ’(p.10.)
‘the savagies of The National Student.’ (p.11.)
[The author ends with Joyce:] ‘ The ghosts, our own among them, the memories were assembling before their time. “This [sic for His] thinking was a dusk of doubt and self-mistrust ... and he met the eyes of others with unanswering eyes for he felt that the spirit of beauty had folded him round like a mattle and that in reverie at least he had been acquainted with nobility. But, when this brief pride of silence upheld him no longer, he was glad to find himself still in the midst of common lives, passing on his way amid the squalor and noise and sloth of the city fearlessly and with light heart.”. Joyce was glad to be a student “in the midst of common lives.”. So were many, I think who had the slap-dash freedom of 86.’ [End.] |