The Colony

by Audrey Magee

returned the kitchen chair to the slate slab and sat down, uncertain of what to do next, of how to wait in a place where nothing happens a place without need of happenings

So why do you do it, Mr Lloyd, when you can buy them coated? I like the ritual. Doing it as has been done for hundreds of years. Why?

harshness everywhere, I know, city or country, but here it is more exposed, stripped bare by the weather and our isolation. That simplicity doesn’t suit a lot of people. They say it bores them, but I have watched. It’s not boredom, JP. It’s fear. The barrenness and rawness frightens them. Sends them away to cloak themselves in timetables, bills, holidays and houses, in sofas, kitchen counters and curtains, a life of buying and owning to mask the bareness of existence. Hide its harshness. Make it more palatable. Tolerable. But I wonder if it does?

much of it is this hunt for affirmation in a world that affirms little, if anything at all. As though some title could confirm who you are. Some house or car could prove your worth. I suppose that it works for some. Men think it attracts women, I suppose, but what type of man is that? And what type of woman is that, JP? Be thankful to God for what you’ve got, I say, and stop all the time chasing after the next new shiny thing. Sure, that makes us no better than the magpie.

Nietzsche would obviously abhor your slavish acceptance of the way you live, a life inherited from your mother, from your grandmother, but Schopenhauer would admire you, Bean Uí Fhloinn. He’d like your rejection of society’s superficiality, your refusal to be the magpie.

talking of the regularity of the killings, the seeming intractability of violence up there, over there,

Keep thnking about the small ways the mainland makes it to the island through Art, radio, cake/ship deliveries, library loans