Home - sort of...

Back from vacation for a week now. At least the body is - the mind and spirit are still in Ireland. Wonderful trip, wonderful place, wonderful people both our hosts and fellow travelers. 

Tough getting the motivation to get back up to speed.  This week at work involved a major WAN upgrade, an e-mail server change, and jump-starting the installation of mounted data projectors and interactive white boards in 102 classrooms. Sort of boring. Still have not had the heart but to peek at the waiting backlog of blog entries I should be reading.

The trip to Ireland led me to re-read Thomas Cahill's marvelous short history, How the Irish Saved Civilization (1995).  A few interesting bits.

In discussing the fall of the Roman empire, Cahill writes (again from 1995):

There are, no doubt, lessons here for the contemporary reader. The changing character of the native population, brought about through unremarked pressures on porous borders; the creation of an increasingly unwieldy and rigid bureaucracy, whose own survival becomes its overriding goal; the despising of the military and the avoidance of its service by established families, while its offices present unprecedented opportunity for marginal men to whom its ranks had once been closed; the lip service paid to values long dead; the pretense that we still are what we once were; the increasing concentration of the populace into richer and poorer by way of a corrupt tax system, and the desperation that inevitably follows; the aggrandizement of executive power at the expense of the legislature; ineffectual legislation promulgated with great show; the moral vocation of the man at the top to maintain order at all costs, while growing blind to the cruel dilemmas of ordinary life - these are all themes with which our world is familiar, nor are they the God-given property of any party or political point of view, even though we act as if they were.

 Cahill also quotes William V. Shannon:

Supreme egotism and utter seriousness are necessary for the greatest accomplishment, and these the Irish find hard to sustain; at some point, the instinct to see life in a comic light becomes irresistible, and ambition falls before it."

I am a quarter Irish - what's your excuse?

And this delightful translation of a poem written by a 9th century scholar-monk:

I and Pangur Ban my cat,
'Tis a like task we are at:
Hunting mice is his delight,
Hunting words I sit all night.

'Tis a merry thing to see
At our tasks how glad are we,
When at home we sit and find
Entertainment to our mind.

'Gainst the wall he sets his eye,
Full and fierce and sharp and sly;
'Gainst the wall of knowledge I
All my little wisdom try.

So in peace our task we ply,
Pangur Ban my cat and I;
In our arts we find out bliss,
I have mine and he has his.

Good to be home.