Rachel Friedman

I’m a little late in reading John Jeremiah Sullivan’s NY Times piece on Ireland, but my day is better for finally getting around to it. I was on the hook from his first sentence, really: “Ireland starts for me with the end of “The Dead,” which my father read to me from his desk in his basement office in New Albany, Ind.”  Yes, I thought, me too.

And then when he describes the text his father read from, “excellent forest green is the cover of “The Portable James Joyce,” my mother’s Penguin paperback from college,” I thought, oh come ON. Because I too have a forest green cover from a different inherited Joyce text:  Dubliners. The price listed is $1.45. On the first page, in the right hand corner, my father wrote L. Friedman. Underneath it I matched it with R. Friedman. This page also lists other books by James Joyce and next to each of those my father has read (or intends to read? I’ve never asked him to clarify) is a little red check mark. There’s one beside A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses but there’s a definitive, upper case NO next to Finnegans Wake. Same for me. Yes please to everything Joycean except the (mind-expanding or mind-numbing depending on your perspective) Finnegans Wake to which I too say NO thank you.

I  realized while reading  Sullivan’s essay, rife with literary references, that I was first inclined to travel because of books. I went to Ireland at twenty – my first solo trip – because Joyce seemed to be begging me to. I wanted to know his characters, which at the time I didn’t realize were not the same as actual Irish people. One of many much-needed life lessons learned abroad.

It’s easy to characterize reading as a sedentary pursuit. Of course the physical act often is.  But the activation of our imaginations is anything but. For many of us, reading is the way we get to know the world – our first experiences with faraway places and people. It gets us thinking about all that is out there waiting to be explored. Reading is not a substitute for experiencing life; it, ideally, pushes us towards activity and gives us an interesting context when we do find ourselves stumbling down a cobblestone street in Galway at 3 a.m. past Nora Barnacle’s house. I made my friends stop there, all of us blazing drunk, and proceeded to regale them with an incoherent diatribe on Gretta Conroy and Nora Barnacle and then, when they looked like they were losing interest, I brought up Joyce’s salacious love letters to his Galway girl.

If I hadn’t been a reader, I’m not certain I would have been a traveler. And I certainly wouldn’t see places the way I do now, with all their literary layers, which is to say all the history and mystery of those who have traveled there before me.