If we take it that a human life can last 100 years, and subdivide that into twenty year segments, it means that I am in the last section of my life on earth. In theory I suppose I should be enjoying retirement, spending my days in idle contemplation of the happy times I have enjoyed, the wine and roses I have tasted and smelt, maybe even looking for acting jobs and my only worry being to remember to put out the bins on the right day and to do up my flies after getting dressed.
But I spent a few days last week revising Old Irish grammar. It is a very complicated subject, infinitely more complicated than Modern Irish, which is itself a difficult language to learn. So why did I spend precious time re-visiting the 14 declensions of nouns, the dauntingly intricate verbal system, not to mention even the heavily inflected forms of the article and pronouns. Now I didn’t re-memorise the paradigms, I wasn’t that eager, I just wanted to refresh the main points that I had enjoyed ( if that’s the word) learning in my late sixties for my degree in Maynooth University.
When I was satisfied that the main points had been covered and remembered, I put aside the textbooks, at least for the time being.
But why did I do it? I’m never going to read, speak or translate Old Irish again, so why bother to revise the grammar?
Some time ago another query popped into my now idle mind, something that had been puzzling me for a while. What is Modernism? In literature I mean. Not having had a formal education in my formative years I was in the dark on matters like this, but, thanks to modern technology, we have the tools now to cast light into the darker areas of our ignorance.
So with the help of various search engines, mostly Wikipedia, I found out quite a lot of what I was looking for. Much to my surprised delight I found that I was already familiar with the work of some of the giants of the genre, Joyce, Yeats, Fitzgerald, Eliot. But one name came up whose work I had never read, Virginia Woolf. In my ignorance I had always assumed that she and the whole Bloomsbury set were stuffy Victorians who had little to offer a 20th century reader. But I soon saw that she was in fact a leading light of modernism, respected and admired on that score. So with the help of another wonderful modern facility, Kindle, I bought some of Woolf’s oeuvre.
I started by reading her essay on the difficulties facing women writers through the ages in being accepted into literary circles, A Room of one’ Own. I was blown away by the clarity and strength of her arguments, and the unfairness of the system.
I moved on to Mrs.Dalloway, reputed to be her masterpiece, bought on Kindle for less than a Euro. And once again I was delighted and intrigued. Her use of the stream of consciousness technique was fantastic. Maybe To The Lighthouse wasn’t quite as brilliant but is still a fabulous novel. And so I had managed to read some of the work of another pillar of the Modernist movement.
And as you may have already guessed, I was now faced with the question, if that’s Modernism, then what is Post-Modernism? What’s that all about and why does it matter, if it does indeed matter.
Once again I did my homework, read all I could find about the Post-Modernists and found to my surprise that I had read and enjoyed their work, many of them years ago. Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, books by Umberto Eco, Pynchon, Joseph Heller, Nabokov, all familiar and liked. And I hadn’t known they were Post-Modernists.
So the question now is, am I any better off by knowing which writers fit into which category and why. Why do I go off on wild-goose chases like these, in pursuit of knowledge that will not make a blind bit of difference to my life, or to my reading habits. If you have an opinion on these questions, let me know, I’m always open to new views on old news.