On Timeless Shores [antikvár]

FIRST VISIT TO IRELAND Many years ago, when I was in my early twenties, it was arranged that I should go to Ireland and pay some casual visits there, first to a couple of houses where English friends were temporarily settled and then to an Irish acquaintance. We girls of the Edwardian age used to spend a good deal of our time in paying visits, for when we had been "finished" at our respective schools we would return to a home life that was strangely empty; further book learning was not encouraged, yet we were not given any regular occupation. These parentally-inflicted visits would in some cases lead to marriage, or at any rate to the formation of new friendships which, in their turn, might lead to marriage; more often they would just pass the time. In those days I knew nothing of the art of travel. I did not even realise that to stay in friends' houses was only to exchange one purblind, sheltered form of existence for another. I know now that if one wants to enlarge the mind by travel, to get into touch with the spirit of an unknown country, one must go forth without obligations, restraints, set plans or time limits; preferably alone but, at the worst, with one chosen companion; and preferably on foot but at any rate travelling slowly, with due expenditure of personal energy in the discarding of everyday ties, the crossing of boundaries and the settling down in an unknown place. Nowadays, when we arrive in some foreign land, dropping from the sky after a few hours of cushioned ease in extremely rapid motion that has entailed no personal effort, we have not consciously passed any frontier, not been able to register those stages of transition between the known and the strange, the past and the present, which