I went to Ireland

So I haven’t posted in over a week, which I know bothers all two of you. It was spring break so I went to Ireland and I didn’t pack my laptop because I knew I would have to lug it for a few thousand miles. This turned out to be the absolute wave because I did in fact carry all of my earthly possessions on my back across an island the size of Indiana.

Oh mon Dieu, did I travel. My schedule was as follows: arrive in Dublin on an airplane, and then a week later go back to France on an airplane. I didn’t have sleeping arrangements, I didn’t have travel plans, and I certainly didn’t know how the Irish train system worked. Perhaps vaingloriously, I wanted to actually backpack across Europe.

Here’s something they don’t tell you about backpacking across Europe. The backpack gets heavy. And when you aren’t spending back-to-back nights at the same place, you have to carry that backpack through museums, for miles down empty roads, on tours, all around confusing cities, along the hiking trail of a cliff’s edge, and the bathroom.

The plan was to book a hostel or whatever on Airbnb every morning for where I would spend the night. Gotta say, not the best way to beat travel stress. I’ve never in my life not known where I’m going to rest my head. It was… eye-opening.

So I started in Dublin. It’s smaller than New York and more spread out than Nashville and those are the only two cities I know. It was foggy and a little rainy. I had a bus tour to get to but I decided to visit Trinity College first. For those of you who don’t know, Trinity College is a Very Old and Very Important College. Oscar Wilde went there. It’s library holds some 200,000 super-duper old books, sorted biggest to smallest so their weight doesn’t cause the building to collapse. The oldest harp in Ireland, rumoured to have been played by the original Irish king, sits in its main hall behind glass. And below the library, in a dark and small room, is perhaps the most important artefact of Irish culture. The Book of Kells.

Pictures are not allowed of the Book. It was completed in the ninth century and could be damaged by flash. It’s a miracle it survives at all. The monks who hand-wrote it used vealskin instead of paper, so it’s more durable. It’s about the size of a coffee table Bible. Which is exactly what it is. The book was created to be a decorative reference guide for other monks; not studied, just loved and looked at. It’s simple. It’s Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, in Latin. That’s all it is. Gospels from centuries ago.

The book is a monument to the way worship changes people. The monks who wrote this thing painted such detail into each word and drawing that a lot of it can only be seen with a microscope. Each letter is completely unique. Each header holds a tiny gold universe. The colors they used were so rare and so brilliant at the time that the book was said to be crafted by angels, not men. And I got to see it.

Some pages are held open for viewing; it changes every so often which ones. When I was there, the pages were part of the story of Jesus destroying the market in the temple… I think. For one, I can’t read Latin, and two, every letter is so unique that even a fluent Latin reader couldn’t make sense of it unaided. I tried to find words I recognized, but it’s easy to get caught up in the spiraling details in the corners, and the swirls of living color in the lines.

Here is a small section of an unimportant heading letter in the book:

That’s the letter T.

This book is the basis for Irish culture. This handmade, ancient font is what guides modern Irish writing and design. These very colors are everywhere on the island. Little details matter more than the big picture. The looking, the finding them, is the important thing.

So that was the morning of day one of Ireland. If I don’t pass out, get bored, or need food in the next few hours, I should be posting the rest of the week’s posts today. No promises. Sorry about your inbox.

Cordialement,

Allison

P.S.: It has come to my attention that a classroom sometimes reads this blog as a group. This is horrible. Each of you need to read it individually on your phones so I get enough traffic to run ads and get sponsors. Come on, y’all, I’m a college student in an expensive country. Let me sell your data to Google or whatever so I can stay in baguettes and fromage.