A Happy Memory

It's funny how experience is constantly being digested, filtered, revisited, revised, and so on.

I used to think of this as "the darkroom of the soul" (I think I used the phrase in a poem, back in my teens).

One particular happy memory has been coming to my mind a lot recently.

It was the first Christmas I spent in UCD library, so that was almost twenty-two years ago now. It doesn't seem that long.

As often happens to me, two different memories seem to be "spliced" together.

One is a book that I received as a Kris Kindle gift at the first library Christmas party I attended. It was a book with the title Can Reindeer Fly? The Science of Christmas. The cover was very appealing; the silhouette of Santa's sleigh, pulled by reindeer, over a glowing white moon. It wasn't cartoonish but somewhat realistic. (Strangely, I can find the cover image online, but not this version of the book's cover.)

The other memory, from the same Christmas, is of discovering the website Snopes.com.

The internet was still relatively new to me at this time. I suppose it was relatively new to most of the world. When I started in UCD, I didn't have my own work computer so internet access was restricted to fifteen minutes here and there on shared computers. In fact, at the Allen Library training course I attended immediately before UCD, we had rostered "internet time" to use the internet. (The first website I can remember visiting regularly was The Philip Larkin Society page.)

I'm a partisan of the internet, in general. Pope Francis says it's a gift of God. There's a part of me that regrets all communications technology since the invention of the telephone. I'm nostalgic for the sort of self-contained communities that generated their own culture, their own proverbs, their own idioms, and so forth.

But I think the internet is an improvement on the communication technologies that proceeded it, such as the radio and the television. (I won't say the cinema.) Television and radio created passive mass audiences; the internet is open to everybody, and nurtures a bewilderment of interest groups of all sizes.

Besides, and more relevantly here, the internet has its own aesthetic. It's greatly inferior to the aesthetic of the printed word, but it's there. I don't have time to describe it. I might elsewhere.

Anyway, in the Christmas season of 2001, I spent a lot of time browsing the website Snopes.com. It's a website dedicated to urban legends, and it contained many entertaining articles, written with great wit and flair by Barbara Mikkelson. Barbara has since left the site, which has descended into liberal propaganda.

It's also a lot less visually appealing than it used to be. Back then, the site was very clean and white, very uncluttered. Urban legends were identified as true, false or a mixture of both using green, red and yellow "buttons"-- I don't know how else to describe them. They were so bright they took me back to "low babies and high babies" (Irish pre-school), and the colourful plastic pegs that we used to fit into a cardboard grid, to indicate something or other-- attendance, or some such thing.

The website also used a lot of very simple clip-art, which gave it an endearingly playful atmosphere.

Urban legends are one answer to a problem which appears to me, more and more, as one of the central problems of our time-- how do we "enchant" or "re-enchant" ordinary, suburban life? Most of us now live fairly prosperous, safe, comfortable lives with a good deal of leisure time. However, a tide of rationalization, standardization and banality seems to be passing over the whole developed world. Can we celebrate and affirm this world of supermarkets, housing estates, and indoor shopping centres, or must we always be seeking escapism in true crime TV shows, superhero stories, and travel abroad?

I spent hours and days hopping from page to page on Snopes, that Christmas. I remember drinking a lot of Coke (Coke features prominently in many of my nostalgic memories).

Much of the appeal of this memory comes from a sense of new departures. The job was new, the internet was new, UCD was new, I felt at the beginning of something. (And, although it's tough to admit, 9/11 undoubtedly gave the world  a shot in the arm at this time. Perhaps it sounds better if I say that the stories that filtered out of that awful day gave us all, I think, a keener sense of the preciousness and precariousness of life. But it also dispersed the "end of history" atmosphere that had been heavy at the time.)

I've noticed that this "start of something new" atmosphere is a recurrent and important one in my life, one which stimulates my imagination and perhaps even revitalises my soul, to a remarkable degree. I remember it with lots of things: secondary school, college, a new job, discovering poetry (in my early teens), my great phase of cinema-going (in my early twenties), coming to the Catholic faith, travelling to America a lot to visit my future wife , marriage, and so forth.

"Something new" trivializes this sensation, perhaps. To put it more poetically, it's the sense of an opening horizon.

I associate it with one night in Limerick as a child, when we had gone to visit my aunt on her farm. She wasn't at home when we arrived, and we were locked outside for a while. Night was falling, and I was amazed at how many stars I could see away from the light pollution of Dublin. Hundreds more seemed to be appearing every minute.

I associate this sensation, also, with the wonderful lines from "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" by Keats:

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific—and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

(Of course, the shallow and indulgent way to experience this sensation would be to launch into a succession of new commitments, abandoning each one for the next. That's obviously not what I mean.)

As well as the sense of an opening horizon, the pleasure of this memory comes from a combination of two things: activity and retreat. The memory of the Christmas party, and the sense of festive bustle and activity I got from flicking through Can Reindeers Fly? (which featured a lot of whimsical scientific questions connected to the holiday), was crucial to the enjoyment of lazily browsing the net for hours on end. It's a bit like Wordsworth's "emotion recollected in tranquility". Perhaps I should say: "Excitement savoured from calm", or some such thing.

A strange post? Perhaps. I hope it appeals to somebody.