Michael Harding: The pressure of other people made me flee the cityI suppose it’s not a good sign. Solitude gets no brownie points in the secular world of compulsive collectivityWed May 13 2015 - 18:00
Michael Harding: I could watch crows for hours. I see myself in themI know the savagery of the crow is buried in my psyche, and it manifests as rage when I meet an obstacle in life or don’t get my own wayWed May 06 2015 - 06:23
Michael Harding: Winter releases its clutch and the blur falls awaySpring wakens me early in the morning, as the dawn drags songs from the throats of little birdsTue Mar 24 2015 - 09:49
Michael Harding: On my travels, Turlough O’Carolan turns up a lotI suppose it’s because he too was a wandering poet, drifting through the country to perform for crowdsTue Mar 17 2015 - 12:58
Michael Harding: The unbearable bittern-ness of beingWhen Cathal Buí Mac Giolla Ghunna saw the bittern in the early 18th century, the bird was dead and stretched on ice. But I suppose Cathal Buí was projecting his own desperate bewilderment on to the world around himTue Mar 10 2015 - 04:38
Michael Harding: Life takes me from a play for love to a more solitary stageThe last time I was in a JB Keane play, I was a teacher looking for love and the local drama society was my only optionTue Mar 03 2015 - 05:30
Michael Harding: I can bear the winter but spring can be cruelest of allI’m getting addicted to the remote control again, which is a bad sign. It’s as if I can’t live without some sense of control, some assurance that the universe will not overpower meTue Feb 24 2015 - 13:36
Michael Harding: My rustic world seemed too small to be interesting on televisionI heard Brendan O’Connor telling jokes to the audience as I waited to go on to The Saturday Night Show. ‘What are you going to talk about?’ someone asked. ‘I don’t know,’ I replied in panicTue Feb 17 2015 - 01:00
Michael Harding: The longing to be touched gnaws away at many old menI’ve read erotic scenes in books over the years, but I never found anything in life as wonderful as the random promiscuity that could be generated with a Cavan Mineral Water bottle spinning on its sideTue Feb 10 2015 - 05:30
Michael Harding: How I know for sure that I am not CharlieI am not Catholic any more, nor Jew, nor Muslim. But then neither is GodTue Feb 03 2015 - 06:00
Michael Harding: The stillness of a young woman’s gaze can be as frightening as the edge of a cliffI felt unsafe in Bucharest, and the woman who showed me to my apartment was inscrutableTue Jan 27 2015 - 01:00
Michael Harding: ‘Did you ever watch a woman eating a lamb chop?’So the General asked me recently, changing the subject from his prostate examTue Jan 20 2015 - 01:00
Michael Harding: Flirting is like playing tennis without the ballWhat makes it work is spontaneity and the unimportance of the subjectTue Jan 13 2015 - 06:00
Michael Harding: Self-obsession is a complete waste of timeThe ultimate reality is that we are all connected. This is a very wise ideaTue Jan 06 2015 - 10:03
Michael Harding: The vet said there was nothing he could doThere was no stress. Gradually my cat Roxie’s head drooped and I placed her sideways and watched her inhale each final breath, like an oarsman crossing a riverTue Dec 30 2014 - 09:00
Michael Harding: The vet said there was nothing he could doThere was no stress. Gradually my cat Roxie’s head drooped and I placed her sideways and watched her inhale each final breath, like an oarsman crossing a riverTue Dec 30 2014 - 01:00
Michael Harding: My therapist says it’s good to be motheredI don’t care when my friends try to uncouple me from the delusion that some great mother in the sky is holding us. I know as well as anyone else that there is only silence beyond the grave. But faith is an act of the imaginationTue Dec 23 2014 - 01:00
Michael Harding: When I got there her clothes were all strewn on the floorIt was 1973. My American girlfriend was great at kissing. I was terrible. And in the middle of it she would ask questions that made no sense to meTue Dec 16 2014 - 08:28
Michael Harding: Water is so potent even St Patrick didn’t mess with itIt’s not just that our masters want money to service the reservoir system or upgrade the pipes. That would be fine. But they want the water itself, drop by dropTue Dec 09 2014 - 13:03
Michael Harding: The lights go out on another solitary country lifeWhen a farmer dies in the countryside, there is a strange emptiness in the fieldsTue Dec 02 2014 - 07:14
Michael Harding: Zen and the art of showing compassion to carrotsA lesson in empathy on the train to SligoTue Nov 25 2014 - 12:00
Michael Harding: A man in the corner had tears in his eyes for some reasonListening to the accordion music of Tony McMahon could allow a man to live with his own lonelinessTue Nov 18 2014 - 12:00
Michael Harding: I have often wished that I was a womanWomen are open because that’s the nature of connecting with other humans, whereas what makes me depressed is my inability to connect with anybodyTue Nov 11 2014 - 01:00
Michael Harding: The blackthorn bush that rose up out of nowhereThe old man pointed to a bush at the gable of his house with yellowing leaves and purple berries. ‘Oh, look,’ he said. ‘A blackthorn bush. And it wasn’t there this morning’Tue Nov 04 2014 - 01:00
Michael Harding: For the most part of any day I live a bewildered lifeMusic induces in me a clarity of thought far beyond the fog of religion or philosophyTue Oct 28 2014 - 09:48
‘Oh dear God,’ I said, ‘it’s Joan Baez.’ But it wasn’tMichael Harding: It was her skin that interested me. I refused to accept she was 65Tue Oct 21 2014 - 15:15
Our Lady of the Telephone and the Palestinian poetI usually try to avoid politics, but I had been asked to collect Rafeef ZiadahTue Oct 14 2014 - 01:00
The mare looked at me and warmed me to my coreHorses were no more than objects until finally I sat up on one and was forced to trust her. That was intimateTue Oct 07 2014 - 01:00
It’s a frog’s life in the shadow of the lawnmowerI’m melancholic, so I’m constantly afflicted by depressive emotions. Frogs, on the other hand, are more committed to the present momentTue Sept 30 2014 - 01:00
The Zen approach to sheep control in 1970s IrelandIt had never occurred to me that someone in rural Ireland might have been passing the winter with books on Zen back thenTue Sept 23 2014 - 01:00
He even tried to sleep with her, which was a disasterA light film of libidinous sweat shimmering just below his nostrilsTue Sept 09 2014 - 01:00
One for sorrow, two for joy, magpie Irish gets us byBecause my conversation with a fellow student of Irish in Donegal was so limited, we were forced to live in the presentTue Sept 02 2014 - 09:56
Taxi talk turns to Garth Brooks and Dublin’s anti-jiving biasThey can’t abide happy culchies coming up and screaming their heads off in Croke Park and dancing around O’Connell Street, the driver told meThu Jul 31 2014 - 01:00
I prefer simple stories that begin with small eventsI was in Galway. No matter what I did, I couldn’t avoid inhabiting one story or anotherTue Jul 22 2014 - 01:00
Orfeo is not the only one who’s been to hell and backAt a hotel in Clonmel, a middle-aged couple made a dramatic entrance, like a pair welded together in the hell of matrimonyThu Jul 17 2014 - 01:00
I am too pessimistic to find joy in communal hot tubsI used to think young people went to festivals just to get drunk or do drugs. At Body and Soul I realised I was wrongThu Jul 10 2014 - 01:00
Dermot Healy was afflicted with an unruly mindIn his most famous work, A Goat’s Song, he excelled himself in revealing the Irish male as the dreamer, the broken thing that a man becomes when the women have gone awayTue Jul 01 2014 - 01:00
The sadness of a sandwich reminded me of nunsA picnic is just a matter of getting to some place where you can relax, and for me there is nowhere better than the cliffs of DonegalTue Jun 24 2014 - 11:50
Her eyes were beautiful – I was only telling the truthDermot Healy once remarked that the people with the most beautiful eyes in the world often live by the ocean, which is certainly true for BelmulletThu Jun 19 2014 - 01:00
Thoughts about priests in a priestless worldIn college I knew priests who smoked pipes and shot pheasants, priests who would drink all night long, and chaplains who slept with teachersThu Jun 12 2014 - 01:00
The hopefulness of dance and the dangers of lettuce‘When we sit down to eat, we need to make sure that there’s blood running out of whatever is on the plate,’ said the GeneralThu Jun 05 2014 - 01:00
Once upon a time on a train to Lung-fordThe young couple with backpacks became absorbed by each other like lovers in a play by ShakespeareThu May 29 2014 - 01:00
Bundoran is a great remedy for melancholy‘Lounging around in pyjamas and watching a Vietnamese monk talking about suffering is no excuse for a life,’ a friend told meThu May 22 2014 - 01:00
In Ireland, unlike Tibet, the dead are everywhereIrish people are so afflicted by melancholy that even the living look like they are carrying dead weightThu May 15 2014 - 10:03
Putin was naked and his skin covered in feathersThe idea of the president of all the Russias up there with claw feet shaking the chimney pot was not doing me any good at allTue May 06 2014 - 12:31
Beautifully obscure logic on the slow bus to DublinA man with a peaked cap and a long nose hopped on behind me, sat down beside me and started talkingThu May 01 2014 - 01:00
My inheritance: an endless litany of anxietiesAfter my mother died, I was able to decipher all her worries from every little note and memo and grocery list she left behindTue Apr 22 2014 - 12:20
There’s no telling why the good sometimes die youngA BBC drama about the first World War got me thinkingThu Apr 17 2014 - 01:00
Brothers separated by an ocean, linked by lonelinessThe brother in Ireland sometimes called Chicago, although the two spoke little except about the weatherThu Apr 10 2014 - 01:00