Days Without End: AN IRISH TIMES BEST IRISH BOOK OF THE 21ST CENTURY

by Sebastian Barry

Don’t tell me a Irish is an example of civilised humanity.

All that was left in Ireland was the potato for eating and when the potato was lost there was nothing left in old Ireland. She starved in her stocking feet. And she had no stockings. Rags.

I was among the destitute, the ruined and the starving for six weeks. Many went overboard, that’s how it was.

Hunger is a sort of fire, a furnace. I loved my father when I was a human person formerly. Then he died and I was hungry and then the ship. Then nothing. Then America. Then John Cole. John Cole was my love, all my love.

The mind is a wild liar and I don’t trust much in it that I find there.

It’s a dark thing when the world sets no value on you or your kin, and then Death comes stalking in, in his bloody boots.

Time was not something then we thought of as an item that possessed an ending, but something that would go on forever, all rested and stopped in that moment. Hard to say what I mean by that. You look back at all the endless years when you never had that thought. I am doing that now as I write these words in Tennessee. I am thinking of the days without end of my life.

Then the rains came walking over the land, exciting the new grasses, thundering down, hammering like fearsome little bullets, making the shards and dusts of the earth dance a violent jig.

Like we got ten faces to wear in our lives and we wear them one by one.

A man’s memory might have only a hundred clear days in it and he has lived thousands. Can’t do much about that. We have our store of days and we spend them like forgetful drunkards.

He drilled us along the boiling summer ground as if he wished the American sunlight to burn us away like leaves in a bonefire.

Our sorrow spiralling to heaven. Our courage spiralling to heaven. Our disgrace entangled in it like sorrow and courage was so much briars.

Things that give you heart are rare enough, better note them in your head when you find them and not forget.

We’re holding hands then like lovers who have just met or how we imagine lovers might be in the unknown realm where lovers act as lovers without concealment.