Comment by bbor | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bbor | Hacker News Reader

A) Great article, thanks for posting! I would say the headline is a little bit of clickbait (the "complication" implied there is that he had complicated feelings about Ireland, plus maybe some sexual kink stuff), but in 2024 I can't complain. After all, as an ex-Adsense employee, it's more my fault than theirs!

B) "From then on, Joyce lived in Europe." Isn't Ireland in Europe...?

C)

  “Just as ancient Egypt is dead,” he wrote, “so is ancient Ireland.” His aim was not to become bound to a romanticised notion of the Irish past, but to show modern Ireland to itself and to make an Irish literature that was truly European."

A beautiful notion... Will definitely be rattling around in my head as I think about modern nationalism and the extent to which its ever okay to talk about "western civilization" or "athenian legacy" and such with a straight face. Ditto for the "founding fathers" of the USA, really... I'm hopeful we can build a truly global American culture, and hopefully with a bit less bloodshed than secularism cost Europe.

D) If this essay interested you and you haven't read The Hyperion Cantos, I highly highly recommend it! Simmons employs Joyce as a central motif throughout the series, which I recall being somewhat confounding at the time, but likely eye-opening if you're familiar with the man's work!

just a thought on B - being an island in Europe, it’s common for people in Ireland to refer to the rest of Europe as ‘the continent’. It feels like Irish people see ourselves as definitely part of the EU but less so as a geographic part of Europe. Or something

B) "From then on, Joyce lived in Europe." Isn't Ireland in Europe...?

- If someone told me they were from Europe, I'd assume they meant the continent.

This is how many people from the British isles think of it.

"Continental Breakfast" is exclusionary of the isles.

B) "From then on, Joyce lived in Europe." Isn't Ireland in Europe...?

-- technically yes, of course. In reality? Eh, it's complicated. There's probably a few reasons, but if you told an Irish person they were European, people would be bemused, at least.

Ireland tends to top the list of countries happy to be part of the EU. Which would be an odd position if European was a touchy identifier. It’s also not unheard of for people to refer to the mainland as if it were the whole continent.

Regardless of this analysis, the claim you’re respond to is true. Depends on context.

> Which would be an odd position if European was a touchy identifier

They said "bemused", not that it was touchy. The comment seems to imply that Ireland sees itself as a very non-central example of the category "European".

Sort of like ostriches and birds. If you told me that there was a bird nearby, and I rounded a corner to find an ostrich, you'd be technically correct, but I'd still be surprised and probably not trust your warnings nearly as much as I had 10 minutes before.

Not this Irishman…

Nor I.

TL;DR accepting intellectually that we are technically Europeans has very little to do with feeling like European-ness is a part of one's identity.

I thought it'd be obvious that I didn't mean every Irish person would be bemused, but I should have been more explicit.

There's a difference between accepting Ireland as legally and bureaucratically part of Europe, or thinking it's politically or culturally useful to be in the E.U., and feeling that European-ness - however you choose to define it - is a part of our identity as a people.

My anecdotal experience (have lived in two European countries and one non-European country, learning the local languages and diving deep) is that European countries are about as "foreign" to Irish people as any other countries. There are exceptions, and it depends on the country, e.g., we're closer to the Poles now, and have a few fun stories about crates of Prazsky at the wedding in Gdansk.

Try out the experiment - ask an Irish friend or relation of yours if they feel like them and a Finnish / Belgian / Romanian person have something in common, or what they know about that country. My experience is that a lot of people (not everyone, and again, anecdotally) are very uncomfortable even with the idea of imagining that other places really exist.

I don’t think we would be bemused. We generally consider ourselves European

But… if they’re not European… what are they? Sea Peoples? Are you actually proposing that we should designate a north-Atlantic version of Oceania??

Because I’m not entirely anti, to be honest!

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