between the rock and the cold, cold sea

Among the life skills acquired by any Irish pedestrian: the ability to face being drenched at regular intervals with relative equanimity.

This thought crossed my mind as I walked up from the train station this afternoon, through rain that hammered in sheets on the pavements, with a book held protectively under my jacket and my climbing kit unused in my backpack. Since reading cristalia's post last night, I've been thinking a lot about being and (pace Maurice Merleau-Ponty) Being-in-the-World.

There are days when without the space and solitude of the long rocky strand north of the harbour beach here, I think I might go mad. Days when moving through a world filled with people feels like violence, and evenings when riding a crowded train home feels like being trapped in a prison cell. I'm sympathic to the urge to separate yourself from the multitude of noisy, coughing, sniffling, arse-scratching, jabbering, sweaty, filthy, over-enthusiast and often downright rude humanity.

But I'm a pedestrian and a public transport user as much out of choice as necessity. Not because it's better, ecologically speaking, or because I'm opposed to cars for long and awkward or middling and spontaneous journeys, but because it gives me something I would never get if I travelled through the world solo, surrounded by a metal frame. My idea of what communities are like is built around chance meetings on the way to supermarkets, coffee shops or libraries. Grace notes of a world where you shelter from the rain in a doorway with a stranger in a countryman's hat and a trenchcoat, and he grins at you when it slackens: "Swimming all the way home!"

In train stations or in carriages you can meet someone you haven't seen for years, and you can talk to them as though next to no time has passed. A train or a bus journey is a passage suspended in time, a liminal space.

And walking. Walking is how you learn the world. You live in the bits of broken pavement and the new coats of paint, the marker that says Near this spot Seamus Lawless and Sean Gibbons were brutally done to death by British forces while in their custody, 20th September 1920 and the bronze plaque at the site of 164 Pearse St that says "Here perished three firefighters, 1936," and the scent of lilacs in bloom in a patch of dead ground like the promise of summer.

I like the city. I like walking through it, all those layers of history and community constantly creating and recreating themselves, experience inscribed on buildings, and streets, and bodies. You can't understand a place until you've walked through it, Dublin or London or Paris or Athens or Thessaloniki: until you've seen where the city stops being city qua city and becomes uniquely, incomparably itself, a living organic patchwork of streets and neighbourhoods, people and communities.

People who only open themselves to the world in spaces defined by their own needs and desires limit themselves, I think. They narrow their opportunities for spontaneous moments of grace and joy, and they narrow their understanding of the world.

I don't want to knock people who take joy in driving, nor people who drive from necessity, because it's an imperfect world, and a lot of places seem morally opposed to a) joy, or b) functioning public transport system. (Dublin, thankfully, is actually getting better, but it's a long slow process, filled with setbacks.)

But people who drive out of habit, or because it's simply too much effort to walk fifteen minutes to the shops when they're healthy in all other respects?

That I don't understand.

I hate writing overviews. Statements of intent, bah.

The process looks a lot like this:

The intention of this thesis

The aim of this thesis is to stun everyone with its brilliance.

Well, obviously. Can't put that in, though.

The aim of this thesis is to investigate

The aim of this thesis is to explore Asklepieian healing cult between the fourth century BC and the second century CE, paying particular attention to

The aim of this thesis is to explore Asklepieian healing cult between the fourth century BC and the second century CE, with particular reference to the experience of the suppliants who came to the sanctuaries of the god journeyed to the sanctuaries of the god Asklepios in search of cures.

The aim of this thesis is to explore Asklepieian healing cult between the fourth century BC and the second century CE, with particular reference to the experience of the suppliants who journeyed to the sanctuaries of the god Asklepios at Epidauros, Pergamon, Kos, and elsewhere in search of a cure for their sickness.

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One sentence down. Asklepios Soter alone knows how long the rest of this will take.