The Secret Scripture

by Sebastian Barry

The world begins anew with every birth, my father used to say. He forgot to say, with every death it ends. Or did not think he needed to. Because for a goodly part of his life he worked in a graveyard.

Perhaps his happiness was curiously unfounded. But cannot a man make himself as happy as he can in the strange long reaches of a life? I think it is legitimate. After all the world is indeed beautiful and if we were any other creature than man we might be continuously happy in it.

And a man who can make himself merry in the face of those coming disasters that assailed him, as disasters do so many, without grace or favour, is a true hero.

In a few years I will reach retirement age, and what then? I will be like a sparrow without a garden.

And I am sure I gripped her sleeve many a time too many. In my own parlance, ‘feasting’ on her energy, and giving nothing back.

The baby sees a star winking in the dark night window, and puts out his hand to hold it. So my father struggled to grasp things that were in truth far beyond his reach, and indeed when they showed their lights were already old and done.

As Fr Gaunt edged into our room, the first thing I noticed was how glistening he seemed, his face shaved so closely you could write on it with a pen.

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

There is a moment in the history of every beaten child when his mind parts with hopes of dignity–pushes off hope like a boat without a rower, and lets it go as it will on the stream, and resigns himself to the tally stick of pain. This is a ferocious truth, because a child knows no better.

A child is never the author of his own history. I suppose this is well known.

John Lavelle went to America and I went to a place called the Café Cairo–which wasn’t quite as far.

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.

I tried to be myself, and yet could not really locate that person. Roseanne.

I would rather remember aright than just to remember things so they will stand in my favour.

It is very difficult to be a hero without an audience, although, in a sense, we are each the hero of a peculiar, half-ruined film called our life.

I have to be very careful with these ‘memories’ because I realise there are a few vivid remembrances from this troubled time that I know in my heart cannot have happened.