Yesterday morning with regret I finished reading STONES OF ARAN: LABYRINTH, the fifth of Tim Robinson’s incomparable books on the Aran Islands and the facing Connemara coast of Ireland. I do not say incomparable casually. There may be their equal, but if so I do not know of them.
The five books total 2120 pages. Reading them as I have about ten pages each morning, I have been enjoying the company of Tim Robinson almost since the beginning of the year. I will miss him.
One measure of my appreciation of them is that I read them in paper. There are no e-editions and reading ‘real’ books only re-enforced my strong preference for e-editions where I can change the font and its size, can read them at night without external light, hold them comfortably in one hand, and have hundreds of books in a space no larger than a small magazine.
The books are shown above in the order he wrote them, left to right. That is not how I read them. I started with the middle book, LISTENING TO THE WIND, the first of the Connemara trilogy, read the next two in that trilogy, then read the two STONES OF ARAN.
Robinson and his wife, to whom he refers in the book only as M, moved from England to live on the Aran Islands for several years before shifting to the mainland coast. He walked, bicycled, rode in cars and boats, almost every inch of the islands and the coast. He writes with intelligence and style and wry humor of their geology, biology, botany, archaeology, mythology, history and people. He must have been a likable man and a good listener for he was an outsider in closely knit and isolated communities, an Englishman in a land England treated cruelly, and an avowed atheist in societies where people have killed one another over religion for centuries.
Here are a few quotes from the last pages of LABYRINTH.
Certain families used to keep a lookout posted for sailing vessels inward bound for Galway, so that their menfolk could row out in the currachs to meet them and propose themselves as pilots through the rocks and shoals of Galway Bay. (Jokes were made about these Aran pilots. For example: the Araner assures the captain of the ship that he knows every rock in the bay, and is taken on as pilot. Soon afterwards the ship shudders to a halt against a rock. Captain: “I thought you said you knew every rock in the bay?” Araner: “I do—and that’s one of them!”)
When I read of an old Aran Island man, who was probably younger than I am, say, “There’s nothing for an old man to do”, I thought to myself: Well, perhaps there is.
Robison wrote two endings to LABYRINTH, both of which are serendipitous endings to my reading all five books.
Indeed I have been gone far too long about this island (but see, my darling, the book I have found you among its stones!) And now, have I reached the end of it so soon? With so little seen, less understood, nothing possessed? Not quite, it seems, for at this last moment something comes into view to the west. Perhaps it is just a path of foam kicked up by dolphins, perhaps it is the material of a postscript to my Aran…
And that postscript ends:
The virtue of reality is that no understanding is equal to it; no walk, however labyrinthine, wears out the stone. And so, the Aran I have written myself through is inevitably the Lesser one. But, whether it be the terrestrial paradise, an airy illusion of clouds on the sea, or the work of delusive spirits, I have brought back a book as proof that I was there. Perhaps when I open it in seven years’ time it will tell me what I had hoped to learn by writing it, how to march one’s step to the pitch and roll of this cracked stone boat of a cosmos; but for the time being I cannot read it.
Tim Robinson must share this year with Carol’s retiring and our moving full time to Hilton Head Island, and my not writing for publication or sailing much.
This is the first year in almost half a century I have not written for publication. Some of you will recall that I sold an article last year and the experience was not enjoyable. I have outlived agents, publishers, editors. I expect editors of most sailing magazines know who I am, but I do not have the rapport with any of them that I have had with some in the past.
Of the sailing, the stitches from the most recent skin cancer surgery were removed this morning. I brought the canisters that hold oatmeal, trail mix and protein powder up from GANNET to fill and I will soon make the vast voyage to Charleston—all of about fifty miles from Hilton Head to the mouth of Charleston Harbor.
