From Reading Rites

From Reading Rites Evelyn Conlon (bio) Excerpted from Reading Rites: Books, Writing and Other Things That Matter ( Newtownards: Blackstaff Press, 2023). Then There Were Books when i was young, living up a small road in County Monaghan, my reading pilgrimage began. Once I'd received the gift—for that's what it was—I believed that it would always be there, although how a child could be sure of such a thing is baffling. Not everything turns out as expected. But there it was, this reading; a reliable stanchion, an explainer of how to view the everyday or escape it. No matter what distractions, good and bad, there would always be books to fall back on, to lift mundanity up toward a star of importance, to join me to outside places. I was already cognizant of a world larger than the one I inhabited. Courtesy of the visiting emigrated relatives and their children—at least one batch every summer holiday, and others scattered throughout the year—we were given pictures, accents, and conversation from all sorts of places, particularly London, New York, Washington, Florida, Toronto. And Belfast, which, ludicrously, always seemed further away than the other cities and more intriguing because of that. I now understand that this was because the adults were only getting used to the newly foisted border. Belfast had been their closest city before this, and in their lifetimes it felt as if it had been taken away from them. I knew both my grandfathers and one grandmother, their dates of birth were well before the notion of partition had been bandied about. Indeed, my father's birthday preceded it, and my mother's coincided with it first being mooted. Arriving visitors, from both faraway and nearby, created their own unique carnivals, some noisier than others. And then there was the glee, a lot of cooking and tea-making, the gradual relaxation of established boundaries, the endless conversation, and eavesdropping. When the visitors left there may have been a [End Page 9] bit of sadness—more on some people's part than others, and more at the departure of some than of others—but then there was the settling back into our own lives, the rustling of things back to normal, while making space for the new things that had been learned. And a return to the loyal books that had been left waiting, less opened, semi-neglected. With luck, there were new ones added. I was well prepared for emigration; I could take my pick of destination. It still surprises me that I live in Ireland. It was never my intention to do so, but circumstances dictated that I would, and maybe I'm not sorry now. My growing up took place first in a country two-teacher school, then on to the ten-miles-away town of Monaghan to St. Louis secondary school, where all our subjects were taught through Irish, to the mainly Gaeltacht boarding caliíní who came from around the country, and to the few day pupils, scholarship holders, like me, among them. I loved every day of my St. Louis adventure, a fondness nailed down when I learned how to skip classes that didn't interest me. But when I mitched, I didn't merely waste time (if mooching happily down streets, noticing and wondering, can be called wasting time). Instead, I regularly visited the library, a pokey upstairs set of rooms beside the courthouse, and buried myself in strange, wonderful other worlds. Did the librarian wonder about my timetable? It was there I first learned that some books are not particularly worth reading and some are mind-blowing, become necessary foundations for our ways forward, even if we forget where we first read them. I wasn't, of course, familiar with Schopenhauer nor his words on this matter, but I learned their truth anyway: The art of not reading is a very important one. … A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short. arthur schopenhauer And it was in the back corner of one of those dusty rooms that I found my first book set in Australia. I don't remember what it...

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