The Secret Scripture

by Sebastian Barry

After all the world is indeed beautiful and if we were any other creature than man we might be continuously happy in it.

The beauty of Dr Grene is that he is entirely humourless, which makes him actually quite humorous. Believe me, this is a quality to be treasured

For history as far as I can see is not the arrangement of what happens, in sequence and in truth, but a fabulous arrangement of surmises and guesses held up as a banner against the assault of withering truth.

We have neglected the tiny sentences of life and now the big ones are beyond our reach.

Every nuance of her, every turn of the head, every moment of tenderness between us, every gift, every surprise, every joke, every outing, holidays in Bundoran and later Benidorm, every kind word, helpful sentence, it all gathered together like a sea, the sea of Bet, and rose up from the depths of our history, the seabed of all we were, in a great wave, and crashed down on the greying shore of myself, engulfed me, and would that it had washed me away for good.

A hot Irish day is such a miracle we become mad foreigners in a twinkle.

It was bitter cold but kisses dealt with that.

But fate it would seem is a perfect strategist and will work miracles of timing to assist our destruction.

Imaginings. A nice sort of a word for catastrophe and delusion.

It seems I am fated to record the dismaying bleakness of institutions. It is a constant, unwaveringly. Nazareth House Bexhill was no exception. Their stories seem to be in the very mortar like those ancient seashells, the very redness of the bricks. You could never wash them out, I thought. The very silence of the place suggested other silences.

I supposed all these things. It is not history. But I am beginning to wonder strongly what is the nature of history. Is it only memory in decent sentences, and if so, how reliable is it? I would suggest, not very. And that therefore most truth and fact offered by these syntactical means is treacherous and unreliable. And yet I recognise that we live our lives, and even keep our sanity, by the lights of this treachery and this unreliability, just as we build our love of country on these paper worlds of misapprehension and untruth. Perhaps this is our nature, and perhaps unaccountably it is part of our glory as a creature, that we can build our best and most permanent buildings on foundations of utter dust.