#40: In Dublin, Learning to Travel Reflectively
A different approach to travel in Dublin, one focused on countless hours of sitting or walking in city parks, taught me lessons I carry forward today
A stroll along a canal off the River Liffey in Dublin (photos my own)
There was a time in my traveling life when I could not understand why anyone would want to fly somewhere far away just to sit on a beach. My favorite destinations were mountains in which I could hike and big cities I could explore. I arrived in new countries intent on seeing everything possible. Often I would only have a week, the vacation time afforded me, and I would cling to tight itineraries designed to ensure I would not leave with any regrets from having missed some key experience. I remember once I took a day trip to a small town in Kosovo, and when I left an hour earlier than planned, I spent the bus ride agonizing over the realization that I had forgotten to visit one of the top sights listed on TripAdvisor. I had wasted my trip to Kosovo, I suddenly felt, and I even thought perhaps I was a bad person to have been so negligent with the privilege to be there. And yet now, over thirteen years later, I do not even remember the name of the town I went to that day.
I have since grown far beyond the need to complete checklists over the course of a journey. I still have no desire to lounge about on beaches, if only because I cannot stand the heat of the sun, but over the course of seven days in Dublin last November, I discovered my own equivalent of the beach vacation. It certainly helped that I had already been to Dublin once before, and so the pressures of sightseeing were significantly diminished. Nevertheless, there was much there I had not yet seen, but I found myself preferring to sit reading on benches in parks while occasionally walking around in circles listening to music. The autumn cold, too, was so much more pleasant to me than any tropical beach destination could ever be. My easygoing routine in Dublin’s leafy squares and musical pubs, and along its chilly canals, became one which left me falling in love with the city itself, more than I could have if I’d rushed about taking pictures and seeing sights. The city was not some celebrity I was frantically interviewing, but rather a person I was slowly and naturally getting to know, organically and by instinct. My relationship with Dublin, a friend I constantly miss today and to whom I yearn to return, changed my approach to travel.
Merrion Square, Dublin
I was visiting my brother-in-law, who was working while I was there, and I began each day setting forth alone a bit after eight in the morning. I walked the half hour to Merrion Square in the pleasant chilly autumn air, feeling so satisfied by the brisk sensation against my skin and inside my throat. I could not comprehend the people saying I needed to return in the summer. I was glad to have grey clouds above. I listened to my favorite Phoebe Bridgers songs in my headphones, which carried wistful sounds into my mind, complimenting and enhancing the dreamy yearning with which I approached the beloved fall in Ireland. I always began with “Smoke Signals,” and I often took a detour so I could walk in the early morning along a canal which offshoots off the Liffey River. The beauty of the brown and orange leaves, which hung gracefully over the dark cold water, mesmerized me every time, so that I awoke every day eager for the moment I would first see them there again.
Then I would finally arrive in Merrion Square, and I always tried to time my entrance for exactly 16 seconds into “The Killer + The Sound,” when the sorrowful chords on the piano seemed to blend so perfectly with the first image of the tree branches, grass, and benches I was now yearning to call my home. The first 15 seconds acted to build up my emotions, preparing me for that climactic and wonderful step I would take into the greenery. Soon I was thinking only about the music, the park, and the Sally Rooney book I would be reading there, all of which seemed somehow to awaken within me an apprehensive happiness about what I was doing with my life, a topic on which my long fall days in Dublin left much room for contemplation. I would take my seat on a bench with my to-go coffee, watching the bundled-up locals play fetch with their dogs, and then I would sit in the chill reading thirty pages or so of Conversations with Friends. The people in the book were in Dublin, too, and I related so much to the protagonist that I felt as if I were not here as a tourist but rather as a shadowy projection of the characters’ very experiences. It all came together so mystically, by methods that were so rooted in my own obsessive sensory experience of the city, that I am sure I could not have taken the same lessons away from that book if had I been reading it at home. For its meaning, it merged with my absorption of my environment.
Then, after a couple hours in Merrion Square, I would rise and walk. First simply aimlessly in Merrion Square, listening again to Phoebe Bridgers, but then I would make the short way to St. Stephen’s Green. There, I walked around in circles for a while, following a slightly different path each time. I relished the look of the trees against the pond, and the spirit of James Joyce seemed to gaze upon me hauntingly from the eyes of his statue. He challenged me with the question of how I dared lurk within his awesome presence in the park for which he had declared so much love. Sally Rooney herself had only just recently done a photo op in Merrion Square, and the yearning within me to live the literary life seemed to reach a peak intensity once I was finally seated at one of my favorite benches. It was a spot with a wonderful view of the dark water and the dense fall foliage, and I would re-commence my reading of Conversations with Friends, occasionally looking up to observe the passing tourists and locals, or to simply sit in a worshipful trance of the trees. Then I would walk in a few more circles, listening to the same music, but this time stopping for different views from around the park, and I felt as if I could never be satisfied by the time I spent there. The sense I needed more brought me to one of my other favorite benches, and so the cycle would repeat itself for hours, interrupted only by quick bathroom trips into the nearby mall or swift runs to one of the nearby coffee shops.
St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin
I ended each day again at Merrion Square, which felt so special in the late afternoon. I would post up at a bench while the sun began to set, shivering slightly as I turned the pages of my book. It was easier to move through the pages then. The knowledge that the park would soon close, and that I needed to get back to my brother-in-law for dinner, spurred me to read with greater urgency. Yet the coming of the day’s end brought with it an obstacle to my reading. I often gazed up simply to savor the look of the buildings and streetlights against the dusky sky, and I loved how their colors looked so foggy and vibrant once the sun’s light was nearly totally gone. I would walk in a few circles around the whole park, stopping to read five pages and then walking again, and I would go on like that until the city officials started blowing their whistles. They would stroll around telling people with dogs that it was time to leave. The gates would soon close, they warned. And just then, with my exile nigh, I would sit down on a bench far away from them just to read one or two more pages, before finally yielding to the inevitable and departing. Then I would take a long route back to my brother-in-law, simply so I could walk again along those paths by the canal listening to “Smoke Signals,” “Waiting Room,” and “Punisher.” The music went so perfectly with the leaves at dark. “What did you do today?” my brother-in-law would ask me. And from the hazy afterglow of my soul, which was in a state of such tranquil and quiet contentment that I first found the act of speaking quite difficult, I would tell him that I had mostly just walked around.
This was how I passed most of those seven days I was there. Of course, it wasn’t always like that. I took an hour-long break here or there… to visit the Yeats museum, which left me marveling at the aesthetic majesty of the occult, and to wander through the history museum, which dispelled pleasant but ahistorical myths about the first king of Ireland. And of course there were the days my brother-in-law wasn’t working, during one of which we went for a hike in the countryside outside town, and there were a few short trips I took myself outside the city as well. But even when I left Dublin and went elsewhere, I always found a bench somewhere in a garden or by the ocean where I could sit down and read and look and listen to music. I thought about Frances from Conversations with Friends, about her lack of direction in life and her commitment as a college student to never getting a true professional job. But she did have a direction, I felt; what she loved to do was write, and it simply did not fit into the options which seemed within her grasp. But she was still writing. She was still improving. And she was still putting herself out there, performing what she had written in public, even if not for money.
Walking along the canal, Dublin
At night, my brother-in-law and I went to dinner and sometimes to the pubs. The pubs were another part of Dublin I loved, because I liked to sit and listen to the amateur music sessions, where the musicians take turns choosing songs for the group to sing and play. I wished I could play an instrument or sing, and that if I could, that I would also have the confidence to join them so publicly like that. I had always kept much of my writing so secret, and I admired these people who would just show up and fill the room with music. In the midst of those amateurs playing so passionately and joyfully, I felt another gap between what I wished I was and what I was. A musical gulf joined the literary one. These ordinary guitar and fiddle players seemed to inspire me with the same haunting sense of apprehensive determination that the statue of James Joyce in St. Stephen’s Green did. The professional music in my headphones, all those Phoebe Bridgers songs that stir so many emotions inside me, reinforced the lessons of the pub, calling me to strive toward being able to create something wonderful. What was it that held me back, but did not hold back these other people? If I wanted to be a writer, why didn’t I devote myself more to writing? And if I wanted to play an instrument, why didn’t I invest more time in practicing? I felt a searing regret for the idle and frivolous ways in which I’d spent my time, expending so much energy into an emotionally taxing job I didn’t even want, coming home and passing who knew how many hours wasting my life away binge-watching shows.
I was, in truth, being too hard on myself. I remembered how once I had wanted so badly to learn Spanish. I chose to spend all my time doing it, and I did it, reaching advanced levels of the language through hard and focused work. Still, all the while I was language-learning, I knew there was another passion, the pursuit of which seemed essential to me. “So,” a friend asked me then, “when are you going to stop being a language learner and start being a writer?” I stuttered some response then, sort of fending him off, knowing that in my own way I was procrastinating. With clear milestones and seemingly concrete metrics, it was simpler to study a language than it was to focus on the uncertain path of improving my writing. I would need to constantly contend with the feeling of having failed, of putting countless hours into a piece of work only to hate it afterward. The books in Spanish which I read, and the lists of vocabulary which I memorized, provided more immediately satisfying rushes of achievement. It was a kind of frantic productivity, akin to the drive with which I once blitzed my way through sights on a list of Must Sees in some foreign city. It’s not that it was easy, or that learning a language does not come with its own insecurities and feelings of inadequacy; it’s that it was, to me, more straightforward.
In Dublin, I felt each morning in the park how I had the freedom to choose the more difficult path, the one less gratifying in the short term, if only I could muster up the work ethic and optimistic mentality which I required. If only I could overcome my fears of publicity, and the risks of exposing myself and my efforts to judgement, even just among my friends. The statues of writers, the long mornings and afternoons in the parks, the characters in Sally Rooney books, the stupefyingly inspiring beauty of my favorite Phoebe Bridgers songs, and the passion of the amateur musicians all came together to move me toward that apprehensive happiness I mentioned earlier. Happy, because I knew what actions I needed to perform. Apprehensive, because I feared that in the face of setbacks, I would fall back on the straightforward paths of language courses, dense history reading, or worse: idleness.
Merrion Square, Dublin
Despite my fears of laziness, it was my very willingness to be undirected in Dublin, my very eagerness to pass the time reading and listening to music and relishing the beauty of the parks and the music, that brought me to the invigorating conclusions which set me on my path. It was a kind of productive idleness, although in our day and age, I don’t think reading novels is considered idle anymore. It was once thought to be, mainly because women did it. But it shouldn’t be. Nor should walking around in circles in parks listening to music. Because reflection is productive. The process of absorbing a different environment in some faraway setting is generative in its own way, perhaps more so than a whole week of sightseeing.
It was later during those three weeks in Ireland, while I was out for a thirteen-mile run in Killarney National Park, that I took all my reflection and began to mold it into action. While sitting in a hotel in Belfast, I felt even more strongly the tuggings of the plan. I needed to do the things I wanted to do. I needed to create an accountability structure that would see me writing regularly and publicly. “It doesn’t count,” a musician had told me, “if you don’t put it out there.” Too cruel, yes, but true in a way, because overcoming the fear of being public is essential to grow as a creator. I would benefit not only from the practice of the writing itself, but also from the process of putting it out there, of subjecting myself to the question of what people might think of me. Nonfiction, it seemed, would be a good first outlet for constant publication. And slowly over the next month, the idea to make myself write and publicly release 50 essays in one year emerged.
I keep trying to look again for that experience I had in Dublin. I even thought once during my current trip that maybe I needed to just go back to Dublin, to be there in Merrion Square again, to sit on those same benches in St. Stephen’s Green. Thanks to the personal experiences I had within them and around them, I will never forget the precious moments I passed in Dublin’s parks, and I cherish them much more than I do the visits I’ve paid to some of the world’s most impressive ruins and palaces. Everywhere I go, I now seek out city parks, and I walk around them for hours. I explored countless parks in Vienna, choosing their autumn beauty over almost all the art museums, and it felt at some point as if Dublin had come to me. It was not, then, that I needed to return to Dublin. I only needed to carry forward the lessons from Dublin. To spend hours of each day in a great city’s parks - walking, listening to music, sitting on benches and reading - was a way in which to develop an intimate connection with the place itself. It was a therapeutic process, yielding personal growth through a strange spiritual interplay between the setting around me and my own slow-moving perception of it. To use those beautiful ten days of autumn in Vienna as its own era for my reflection was a way of developing a special relationship between the city and my own soul. And in some ways, perhaps Vienna was an improvement over Dublin, because I did not have quite that same apprehensive happiness as I did in Dublin. Between park visits, I was spending hours writing my book and essays in the cafes, and for that I think back gratefully to my evenings spent lingering in Merrion Square. The lesson I added in Vienna, when I found myself wandering in the woods of the old imperial hunting grounds, was that the serene calm of a long stroll through the park is an end in itself.