The Book That Never Stops Changing

What I’ve learned about Dublin, and myself, in a lifetime of reading Ulysses

- By Fintan O’Toole

When I was a kid, the axis around which Dublin revolved was a huge Doric column that had stood at the center of the city since 1809. On the top was a statue of the English naval hero Vice Admiral Horatio Lord Nelson. Even to a child, his presence seemed anomalous. It was as if Washington, D.C., were dominated by a giant memorial to King George III.

One day, when I was 8 years old, my father and his cousin Vincent led me and my brother up the 168 steps that wound through the hollow interior of the monument we Dubliners called Nelson’s Pillar. I had never before seen the city from a vantage point so high that you could take in the whole place, the bay to the outlying mountains.

But there was, for me, an edge of unease. Vincent had bought half a dozen plums in a fruit shop. When we got to the top of the pillar, he opened the brown paper bag and gave us each one. He and my father started laughing about how they could spit the stones down on the people below. I found this deeply unsettling because I did not know my father could be like that, that he could joke about something I was sure would get us into big trouble. It was also darkly mysterious. The adults clearly thought there was some meaning in all of this—but what did plums have to do with Nelson?