The Secret Scripture

by Sebastian Barry

Sligo made me and Sligo undid me,

I thought others were the authors of my fortune or misfortune;

No one even knows I have a story.

like a lost shilling on a floor of mud, glistening in some despair.

rider rising as if on wings, and crossing the huge wall in a swift and gentle movement, like the smooth glide of a seagull in an upwind.

It is funny, but it strikes me that a person without anecdotes that they nurse while they live, and that survive them, are more likely to be utterly lost not only to history but the family following them. Of course this is the fate of most souls, reducing entire lives, no matter how vivid and wonderful, to those sad black names on withering family trees, with half a date dangling after and a question mark.

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

like the pebbles on the beach there disturbed by the waves, rushing, shushing, a soft sound that sounds in my dreams.

my secrets are my fortune and my sanity.

That strange responsibility we feel towards others when they speak, to offer them the solace of any answer. Poor humans!

tribe of onetime girls.

forgetting its lost women there, in long rows.

stab the words into the page with my biro, as if pinning myself there.

Panic in me now blacker than old tea.

But Fr Gaunt was so clipped and trim he had no antennae at all for grief.

weapons were the scarcest currency of the war.

those who see horrors may do horrors just as bad, that is the law of life and war.

my patients seem to me like a crowd of ewes pouring down a hill towards the cliff edge.

am sure I gripped her sleeve many a time too many.

‘feasting’ on her energy, and giving nothing back.

Now we are two foreign countries and we simply have our embassies in the same house. Relations are friendly but strictly diplomatic.

like two peoples that have once committed grave crimes against each other, but in another generation.

blast her, she has never done anything to me. It is atr...

While I had her good opinion, I had the highest opinion of myself.

When this world here is demolished so many tiny histories will go with it.

like a man drives his pregnant wife in the night to hospital, when the famous pains begin, not that she ever

endured that, and therein maybe lies the crux of the matter.

It was suddenly difficult to speak, as if every word was a little lump of mud in my mouth.

I hate to see all the children.’

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.

One hundred and twenty-three girls had been killed, from

When to speak at all is a betrayal of something, perhaps a something not even identified, hiding inside the chambers of the body like a scared refugee in a site of war. Which

like a salmon I felt, right enough, and stilled myself in the deep water, very conscious of him, and his rod, and his fly, and his hook.

that other younger person she was when I fell in love with her, that is the person that haunts me.

when a man wakes on his fortieth birthday he may safely say he has no youth ahead of him.

That hides in this wrinkled suit of skin. The girl I was.

walked out of Sligo that day and all the way to Rosses Point, where the nicest beach was,

Oh, it is girls of seventeen and eighteen know how to live life, and love the living of it, if we are let.

it, a few pages torn from his raggedy book. Can you love a man you only knew – in the Biblical sense – for a night? I do not know. But there was love there, gentle, fierce, proper love. God forgive me.

I am not an entirely childless person. That story also belongs to the sea, or the strand anyway. My child. My child went to Nazareth, that’s what they told me. Or, that is what I heard them say. But I was not hearing anything very well, very properly, in that time. They might as well have said Wyoming.

It is always worth itemising happiness, there is so much of the other thing in a life,

you had better put down the markers for happiness while you can. When I was in that state, everything looked beautiful to me, the rain slicing down looked like silver to me, everything was of interest

I am looking for my mother in these memories, and I cannot find her. She has simply disappeared.

I suspect it is hard to remember grief, and it is certainly invisible. But it is a wailing of the soul nonetheless

My head is already stuffed with grief I suppose like a pomegranate with its red seeds.

I can only bleed grief, having no room for more.

There are pits of grief obviously that only the grieving know. It is a voyage to the centre of the earth, a huge heavy machine boring down

There was a murk of moonlight on the landing, a mere soup of light. I

we are never old to ourselves. That is because at close of day the ship we sail in is the soul, not the body.

Roseanne is just a bit of paper blowing on the edge of the wasteland.