Wilhelm Meister & Me
By Barry Sheils.
When I returned to Ireland that summer after my travels around Europe with Michael, I took a train by myself to a small town in Leitrim called Carrick-on-Shannon. This was as far north as the train went, the Ulster Transport Authority having in their wisdom many years before closed the majority of the cross-border lines. I had nearly a whole day to kill until my mother’s nursing shift ended and she could drive to collect me, a journey from Omagh that would take her over an hour. The weather was fair so I managed well enough, snoozing in the park where a circus was setting up, watching passers-by.
I assumed Carrick was a typical small town, though I hadn’t made the connection to the town mentioned in so many of John McGahern’s stories: it turns out that Carrick was not just any provincial backwater, it was paradigmatically provincial, refined by literature to represent everything suffocating and ennobling about living in a particular place. An apt location, in other words, for me to remain vaguely European, sublimely detached from my surroundings, and lie the length of that day in imaginative solidarity with my fellow travellers, the bare-chested itinerants who were just then erecting the scaffold for the big top. I didn’t know it at the time but I was playing the part of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, at the end of his travels, artistic and existential experiments behind him, inducted into the secret society of those who know what experience is. I was basking in the feeling of aesthetic bliss adjoined to economic privilege; and this, despite the fact that I didn’t have a penny to my name.