There is a peculiar intensity about some streets in Dublin which becomes more gnarled and layered the longer you live in the city and the greater the stray memories and associations you build up. Sometimes this sense of the city can be greatly added to by history and by books; sometimes, however, the past - I mean the distant past - and the books hardly matter, seem a strange irrelevance. On a busy day it is easy to go into the GPO in O'Connell Street without a single thought for MacDonagh and MacBride and Connolly and Pearse, or without remembering for a second that Samuel Beckett once asked his friend Con Leventhal to betake himself 'to the Dublin Post Office and measure the height of the ground to Cúchulainn's arse', as Neary in his novel Murphy wished to engage with the arse of the statue of Cúchulainn, the ancient Irish hero, patron saint of pure ignorance and crass violence, by banging his head against it. The need to buy a stamp or a TV licence or fill in a form is often too pressing, the queues too long, the malady of the quotidian too richly detailed to be bothered by heroes.

LRB 5 April 2007 | PDF Download