Fin Keegan

Here’s an original story I told at an Open Mic in the Creel in Westport last night.

The Brown Envelope

This story came second in the 2010 Jonathan Swift Satire Contest. I hope you like it.

flickr image by Conor Pendergrast

In the week that the world’s biggest bookseller announced they are selling more Ebooks than hardbacks, it seems apposite to hearken to the message below, written with us in mind by Ulster poet Louis MacNeice.

This dates from just over half a century ago and the time to consider the poem’s meaning has surely come.

Happily our generation comes out of this interrogation rather well, as the English language, whatever the platform, is livelier and more playful than ever. But I leave it to you to decide–after all, the piece is addressed…

        To Posterity

        When books have all seized up like the books in graveyards
        And reading and even speaking have been replaced
        By other, less difficult, media, we wonder if you
        Will find in flowers and fruit the same colour and taste
        They held for us for whom they were framed in words,
        And will your grass be green, your sky be blue,
        Or will your birds be always wingless birds?

        -Louis MacNeice (1957)

From Selected Poems

Flickr Image by ‘Quick, like a mule’ (CC Licensed)

Like so many of its ilk, Dublin Airport has been remodelled in such a way that all traces of its actual location have been effaced: it is now one among thousands of such mediocre nodes to be found in the network of international space, all alike devoid of any indications betraying where you might be on the planet. The same books and magazines and coffee are sold. The same mix of nationalities mill about. The same escalators and monitors and security equipment. The same temperature. The same air.

In Dublin however I came across one exception. At the departure gate there was a large lightbox hung on the wall, bearing the following quote from Lady Gregory, taken from one of her reworkings of Celtic legend:

“It is sweet to people to be telling a lie, but it is bitter in the end.”

Flickr Image by Svenwerk

Recent riots in the Dublin suburb of Finglas and a teenage double suicide in my own county underline the responsibility we all have to help our young people grow up to become responsible, productive, and happy citizens. (Meanwhile, in my old home of Las Vegas, the radio station where I worked was hit by bullets following a post-school fracas across the street.)

The kids are not alright. An essay by Paul Graham examines adolescent unhappiness: his thesis, in a nutshell, is that because of the way we organize Western societies now teenagers are denied the experience of real and meaningful work in their teens. Money quote:

If life seems awful to kids, it’s neither because hormones are turning you all into monsters (as your parents believe), nor because life actually is awful (as you believe). It’s because the adults, who no longer have any economic use for you, have abandoned you to spend years cooped up together with nothing real to do.

But the problem is not that we choose to institutionally educate our children: the problem is how we teach them.

The trick is to teach our young their subjects as meaningful tools to live a better life. Literacy, numeracy, history, geography, and creativity can all be taught in a practical and useful way that has (and is perceived by the children themselves to have) direct benefits for themselves and their community.

Would the children of Finglas be so quick to destroy their environment if they had actually worked, through school, to determine it, say by planting trees or contributing to planning decisions? I do not think they would.

Paul Graham: Why Nerds are Unpopular: paulgraham.com, Feb, 2003

Image: ‘Halt’ by New York Observer on Flickr