Stones of Aran Read Online Free PDF

commandment, which is always subject to challenge on pragmatic grounds if presented as a mere facilitation of survival, might indeed acquire some authority from the attitude to the earth I would like to hint at with my step.) But our world has nurtured in us such a multiplicity of modes of awareness that it must be impossible to bring them to a common focus even for the notional duration of a step. The dolphin’s world, for all that its inhabitants can sense Gulf Streams of diffuse beneficences, freshening influences of rivers and perhaps a hundred other transparent gradations, is endlessly more continuous and therefore productive of unity than ours, our craggy, boggy, overgrown and overbuilt terrain, on which every step carries us across geologies, biologies, myths, histories, politics, etcetera, and trips us with the trailing Rosa spinosissima of personal associations. To forget these dimensions of the step is to forgo our honour as human beings, but an awareness of them equal to the involuted complexities under foot at any given moment would be a crushing backload to have to carry. Can such contradictions be forged into a state of consciousness even fleetingly worthy of its ground? At least one can speculate that the structure of condensation and ordering necessary to pass from such various types of knowledge to such an instant of insight would have the characteristics of a work of art, partaking of the individuality of the mind that bears it, yet with a density of content and richness of connectivity surpassing any state of that mind. So the step lies beyond a certain work of art; it would be like a reading of that work. And the writing of such a work? Impossible, for many reasons, of which the brevity of life is one.
    However, it will already be clear that Aran, of the world’s countless facets one of the most finely carved by nature, closely structured by labour and minutely commented by tradition, is the exemplary terrain upon which to dream of that work, the guide-book to the adequate step. Stones of Aran is all made up of steps, which lead in many directions but perpetually return to, loiter near, take short-cuts by, stumble over or impatiently kick asidethat ideal. (Otherwise, it explores and takes its form from a single island, Árainn itself; the present work makes a circuit of the coast, whose features present themselves as stations of a Pilgrimage , while the sequel will work its way through the interior, tracing out the Labyrinth .) And although I am aware that that moment on the beach, like all moments one remembers as creative, owes as much to the cone of futurity opening out from it as to the focusing of the past it accomplished, I will take it as the site of my book, so that when at last it is done I will have told the heedless dolphins how it is, to walk this paradigm of broken, blessed, Pangaea.

BEFORE BEGINNING
    The circuit that blesses is clockwise, or, since the belief is thousands of years older than the clock, sunwise. It is the way the fire-worshipper’s swastika turns, and its Christianized descendant St. Bridget’s cross. Visitors to holy wells make their “rounds” so, seven times, with prayers. This book makes just one round of Árainn, though seven could not do justice to the place, and with eyes raised to this world rather than lowered in prayer. On Easter Fridays in past centuries the Aran folk used to walk around the island keeping as close to the coast as possible, and although nothing has been recorded on the question it is inconceivable that they should have made the circuit other than in the right-handed sense. This writing will lead in their footsteps, not at their penitential trudge but at an inquiring, digressive and wondering pace.
    I start at the eastern end of the island. The road from Cill Rónáin through Cill Éinne continues past the last village, Iaráirne, and then makes a sharp turn north to a little bay; there is a stile in the wall at that turn from which a faint