The serenity of turning away from the busy world

I WAS in the D4 Berkeley one night last week, in a room on the 4th floor, gazing out at the tips of trees that stand in the forecourt, but I felt sad because there was no moon. I could see the city glaring over the Georgian rooftops, but only the moon can soften an urban skyline, or reveal the heart of the night.

The following morning, the foyer was busy with Chinese men in suits. The Embassy of the People’s Republic was hosting a reception at lunchtime, for some very important guests. Vans arrived with trays of food covered in tinfoil. Women with clipboards checked everything that arrived. Men in silk suits, with oiled hair and spectacles, stood in twos and threes with their hands behind their backs, as Mercs and BMWs arrived, all waxed and shined to perfection, with various dignitaries who may or may not have been dreaming of some substantial future wherein China will inherit the earth.

I wasn’t dressed too badly myself because I was going to a lunch hosted by Julian Gaisford St Lawrence, whose ancestors inherited the earth a long time ago, or at least a portion of it, called Howth. The lunch was in Howth Castle, where he lives.

A handful of guests were served salmon on a bed of asparagus, and from behind Julian, who sat at the head of the table, Jonathan Swift gazed at us from a portrait by Binden. Swift at 60 was besotted by a young lady who had married into the St Lawrence family, and the Dean was a regular guest at the very table we were sitting at, and where he sometimes raged against the audacity of anyone who presumed that they could even inherit Ireland, never mind the earth.

Even though the sun was shining on the sea outside, the dining room shutters were closed and the room lit only by candles, in order to recreate the atmosphere of a dinner Swift might have attended, because the entire event was being filmed, as part of a television documentary about the castle. I kept wondering what the guests in the Berkeley were having for lunch at the embassy reception.

When the filming was done, I got a taxi back to my hotel. The driver was an elderly man, who struggled with the rush hour traffic. I asked him was he starting out for the evening.

“You’re my first fare,” he said, “but I won’t stay out more than a couple of hours.” I wondered why.

He said, “I retired twice, but I couldn’t handle it. I go out a bit now in the evenings. It gets me out of the house.”

That night in bed I felt sad, as I imagined him standing at the window of his semi-detached, unable to relax, or enjoy retirement; unable to let go of his taxi cab.

The week in Dublin exhausted me, so on returning to Leitrim, I went for a long walk, up the hills, through the windmill farms, and past the old derelict mining sites. And because it was a clear day, I could see not just the mountains of Cavan and Fermanagh, but even Ben Bulben, jutting into Sligo Bay.

The bay itself was not visible but I knew it was there, and the sense of the sea’s presence consoled me in a strange sort of way.

I remember seeing a beautiful Chinese painting one time of a man fishing by a river. The scene depicted the serenity to be found when we turn away from the busy world. When we respond to nature’s invitation to withdraw from life, and escape the tyranny of the market place, where we are all slaves.

The ocean has the same allure. Its vast untamed presence is a counterpoint to the ground we stand on. To walk at the shoreline is to give up on worldly business and wallow in the hum, as the tides chase the moon.

And somewhere in China there are probably skyscrapers full of boardrooms where men sit around in suits looking at screens, assessing investment opportunities in Ireland, and how our little market place may become part of China’s future.

So all I can hope for is that they have sometimes heard the hum of the ocean or the call of the occasional river. And I hope that they know the moonlight too, and that it shines sometimes through the glass walls of their skyscrapers, to reveal to them the real and beautiful heart of the night.