![]() ![]() Even a kid in short pants and knee socks could sense that something was up. The years punctuated by the bombing of Nelson’s Pillar marked a turning point. ![]() A dishonest deflection of important questions was a deep-seated habit. O’Toole’s sweeping, intimate book covers a lifetime of Ireland’s history: a period of six decades when the country transitioned from one thing to another with little understanding of where it had been or where it was going, and was content to wear blinkers. It was, he writes, “the first time I was conscious of pure memory, of the idea that something you had in your head was now gone forever.” ![]() That March day in Dublin feels as present to me now as it does to O’Toole. I rode into the city with my dad and collected pieces of granite I keep one on my desk. O’Toole and I must have crossed paths that morning, or come close, because our fathers had the same impulse. My father picked up a small piece of the granite, its outside worn grimy by the murk of the city, its inside glistening with newly revealed speckles of quartz, a secret self, hidden within the monument until the shock of the explosion so violently brought it to life. He took us right up close to the base where huge lumps of stone were scattered randomly like pebbles. He said it was a big thing, an event we should remember. My father got us up early that morning and we took the bus in to see the wreck of Nelson. Thinking back on the moment, O’Toole writes: I had paid my sixpence and spiraled up the interior staircase many times. As everyone soon learned, an IRA splinter group had blown off the top of Nelson’s Pillar, an imposing column in O’Connell Street that some saw as a symbol of British oppression but most regarded as a convenient landmark and an elegant viewing platform. I was a schoolboy, a little older than O’Toole our home was a mile or so from his. My American family had moved from the United States to Ireland for several years. exactly-O’Toole’s mother, given to premonitions, awoke and exclaimed, “God, what was that?” Then came the sound of a distant explosion. In a Dublin bedroom in the chill dark of early morning-1:31 a.m. E arly in the pages of We Don’t Know Ourselves, Fintan O’Toole’s masterful “personal history” of modern Ireland, I came upon a moment in O’Toole’s life that intersected unexpectedly with my own. ![]()
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