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– the configuration imitating that of the ancient dolmens that pagan Celts may have used as altars for praying or sacrificing choice cows or irritating daughters. Nobody rightly knows, because these mysterious structures were built one to three thousand years before writing came to Ireland.
    “I didn’t pack this – did you?” I demanded, certain that we had left a nearly identical photograph on the wall of our study in Connecticut. Having been on hand at the creation of these particular monoliths, I had taken that picture.
    “No, absolutely not.”
    Bizarre. The cottage, dolmen, and beehive were the handiwork of a dear friend of mine named Bun. In the monsoon-wracked winter of 1975, I joined him to muck around with troughs of cement at the end of Kerry’s magnificent Dingle Peninsula, between an English-speaking village called Ventry and an Irish-speaking one called Dunquin and the celebrated Blasket Islands beyond. The winds howled and a mad shepherd screamed while we troweled stones purloined from the recently dismantled movie set for Ryan’s Daughter into the slowly rising walls of the very cottage in the photograph – this strange hieroglyph to my own past.
    Journeys are said to often assume the shape of a circle, but thiswas too much. Beyond uncanny, it breathed over the house like a talisman. Bun Wilkinson had been a beloved figure in my life, and his spirit had forever beckoned us back to Ireland.
    In September 1973 I had rented a gate lodge on the Hill of Howth on an isthmus north of Dublin, a clapboard bungalow at the entrance to a nineteenth-century estate that was ringed by cliffs and elaborate gardens lazing above the capital’s vast bay. The address, ten miles from the Trinity College I was meant to be attending, was half country at the time. Alas, Ireland’s gaudier classes are now paying one and two million pounds for digs in the vicinity, which their parents could have purchased for a song. Back then, the shady Ceanchor Road and its neighboring lanes whispered refuge. Cows swatted flies across the lane and the post office was a dark parlor in an old lady’s gloomy house. On the long lawns of the Stella Maris Convent a thousand feet away, Joyce’s Leopold Bloom enjoyed his celebrated frolic with Molly, which was reenacted there in Joseph Strick’s film of Ulysses .
    The cliffs ranged in a mile-long crescent to the unicorn-white tower of the Baily Lighthouse, whose young keepers used to invite me up for late-night bottles of porter. Their foghorn moaned through winter nights so damp that one could have scooped glasses of water from the air. Like a monk in a Kerry beehive, I read constantly – above all, Brian O’Nolan who is better known by his pseudonyms of Flann O’Brien and Myles na Gopaleen. His fabulous characters leaned so long into their bicycles that they became half-bicycle themselves, and were stalked by noncorporeal beings with names like De Selby and Joe. Flann O’Brien celebrated a world only partially awakened from dream, one that was still prone to roll back to sleep if that strategy would make life’s demands go away. He drank himself to ruination.
    But what a mark did Flann leave:
    Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes’ chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired into the privacy of my mind, my eyes and face assuming a vacant and preoccupied expression. I reflected on the subject of my spare-timeliterary activities. One beginning and one ending for a book was a thing I did not agree with . . .
    Examples of three separate openings – the first: The Pooka MacPhellimey, a member of the devil class, sat in his hut in the middle of a firwood meditating on the nature of the numerals and segregating in his mind the odd ones from the even. He was seated at his diptych or ancient two-leaved hinged writing-table with inner sides waxed. His rough long-nailed fingers toyed with a snuff-box of perfect rotundity and through a gap in his teeth