Get Your Irish Up

Five Hibernian contributions to world culture.

1. Cloverleaf intersections. A terrible beauty is born.

   

2. Unintelligible masterpieces. In his Lectures on Literature, Vladimir Nabokov walked me through Ulysses, but I still didn’t get half of James Joyce’s baffling references, footnotes, and in-jokes. Maybe that’s why I, like so many readers, was thrilled when Molly Bloom utters the last words in the novel: “I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”