Many thanks to everyone at the wonderful International Festival of Literature Dublin for inviting me to talk about aphorisms, and many thanks to everyone who came out on a cold, rainy Dublin Sunday afternoon for my conversation with John Connell, author of The Wisdom of Farmers: What We Can Learn from the Land, moderated by writer/editor Gary Quinn.


Aphorisms are everywhere in Dublin, including in Merrion Square Park, where the Festival is held. The park features a sculpture of Oscar Wilde reclining on a rock. Nearby is a little obelisk with some of Wilde's sayings on it...

To become a work of art is the object of living.

Only the shallow know themselves.

Of course, James Joyce is everywhere in Dublin, too. My first stop was Davy Byrnes, the "moral pub" Leopold Bloom visits in Ulysses, which I discovered has a ravishing first edition of the novel in the back behind glass.

And no visit to Dublin is complete without paying homage to the spectacular Book of Kells housed in the Old Library at Trinity College. The Long Room of the Old Library also holds Gaia by Luke Jarrams, which hovers majestically above the dark shelves and the august white busts of Irish scholars.

Joyce put the world into a book, Ulysses, and Trinity College put the world in a library.