Days Without End

by Sebastian Barry

Children may feel epic and large to theyselves and yet be only scraps to view.

We knew we was just fragments of legend and had never really existed in that town. There is no better feeling.

The point is, we were nothing. No one wanted us. Canada was a-feared of us. We were a plague. We were only rats of people. Hunger takes away what you are. Everything we were was just nothing then. Talk, music, Sligo, stories, future, past, it was all turned to something very like the shit of animals.

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.

I look back over fifty years of life and I wonder where the years went. I guess they went like that, without me noticing much. 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.

Oftentimes in America you could go stark mad from the ugliness of things. Grass that goes for a thousand miles and never a hill to break it. I ain’t saying there ain’t beauty on the plains, well there is. But you ain’t long travelling on the plains when you begin to feel clear loco. You can rise up out of your saddle and sort of look down on yourself riding, it’s as if the stern and relentless monotony makes you die, come back to life, and die again. Your brain is molten in its bowl of bones and you just seeing atrocious wonders everywhere. The mosquitoes have your hide for supper and you are one hallucinating lunatic then.

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