Literary Dublin

 After a sleep long enough to slay the beast that is jet-lag, we got down to our real business with Dublin. The city has a rich literary history, so we dedicated an entire day to being unapologetic book nerds (okay… so what if that is not such a departure from every other day). 

The day started with a book lover's promised land: Trinity College. This library is by far the most beautiful library I've ever had the pleasure in which to breathe. 

The college itself was a cinch to find and walk to from downtown Dublin. 

The campus of Trinity College was so glorious that it even had me considering returning to grad school for my PhD (almost had me, but not quite). 

After a small wait to enter the Book of Kells exhibit (from which you can access the library), we snaked our way through the displays, only half reading for not being able to contain our excitement. 

The feeling upon entering the room is one I can only equate to one other moment in my life: seeing the Sistine Chapel for the first time. The experience of walking into a vast room and being entirely enveloped in beauty and art is one of the best experiences life has to offer. The scale, the age, the sheer size and even aesthetic beauty of the library had me literally standing with my jaw dropped and my eyes wide.

After the precursory walk around to try to commit every detail possible to memory, Alex and I engaged in a mandatory photo shoot. There were numerous busts of memorable philosophers and historical figures that Alex clearly had to pose with. I will only make you suffer through one such photo, even though I had to take roughly 27 of them. 

When he stops goofing around, my brother doesn't look half bad. 

This might be one of my favourite pictures of me every taken, if only for its ability to mentally transport me back to the instant in which it was taken.

In our day of literary Dublin, we saw artifacts from Beckett repeatedly, but this had to be my favourite: one of the original prints of Waiting for Godot.

Alex and I tried to take a picture that could capture our feelings about being present in a place we had dreamed about so long:

Our tour of literary Dublin continued with a walk over the home of Oscar Wilde, one of Alex's favourite literary figures. As cool as it was to see the building and stand on the doorstep (and of course have an excuse to talk about Oscar Wilde), we couldn't actually go in the building as it has been repurposed. 

Our final stop of the day was to the Writer's Museum, a wonderfully rickety old building. This museum made me acutely aware of the problem of a writer's museum: all of a writer's best artifacts are available for purchase at your local bookstore. This museum did however curate nice biographies with a perfect amount of historical and cultural context for Dublin, with a few nice pieces of art, and many, many typewriters. 

 Oh, and James Joyce's piano.