My bags are in a fluctuating state of preparedness. My tickets are ready. My housing is sorted. I've said all the goodbyes I needed to say. Everything is ready to go, but that train has yet to pull into the station. This is the most difficult part of leaving. It's also the most difficult aspect to express: I remain keenly aware that there is a balance one must strike between being ready to leave and being too eager to leave people behind.
One of the most important lines in all of literature, and most certainly all of Irish literature, comes from James Joyce's 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man'. At the very end, Stephen Dedalus, the fictionalised representation of Joyce, declares himself an exile. Stephen writes, 'Welcome, O life, I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race'. While the grandeur of this statement is characteristic of Dedalus, it strikes at something elemental to the individual seeking his own fortune. This sentiment is by no means limited to Joyce; indeed, Kate O'Brien, whose name you will hear often on this blog, writes in strikingly similar terms about a young school girl in 'The Land of Spices'. The existential yearning to confront one's fate head-on is timeless.
When I first studied at the University of Limerick (UL), I read O'Brien's 'The Land of Spices' for the first time and it crystalised my own experiences of self-determination. Anna Murphy, O'Brien's semi-autobiographical protagonist, expresses this existential opportunity as an 'obstacle race to the unknown [that] ended on a wide horizon' (O'Brien 280). There is a tradition of looking to another place for the space to find one's self. Perhaps that is another reason why I am ready for that plane to be in the air.
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