more Ireland

I did take the train down the coast to Dalkey, as my UCD friends recommended (against the first taxi driver, who recommended Howth to the north). Dalkey is a quaint seaside town. The only surprise was that it wasn’t all that easy to find the pier.

Usually when you leave a train station on a hill in a seaside place (think Brighton) you’d have to be a fool to miss the sea; you just follow the road sloping down down down the hill and eventually you reach the sea. But in Dalkey, the roads wind parallel with the sea, and it being a Sunday, there was almost no residents on the street. But I did eventually find two people whose combined advice gradually built up into a solution.

The seaside is a pier, not a beach, dominated by older men wearing nautical caps and talking about things I never got around to eavesdropping on. My only disappointment was that the sign reading “Do Not Feed the Seals” did not guarantee any seals in the vicinity. I only saw dozens of gulls, and though they may be my favorite animal, they’re of course not as noteworthy as seals.

Is there some kind of “seal season”? Do they migrate? This leads me back to the “concept of children” notion… We’ve all heard the boastful cliché: “I’ve forgotten more about X than he knows about it.” But where this is most applicable may be knowledge about animals. I’d guess that a sizable percentage of us knew more about animals in childhood than we know now. I remember having learned all kinds of facts about marsupials, dolphins, and exotic cats before the age of 10 or so, but it’s now a complete blank in my mind. And I think I once knew a lot about seals from schoolhouse lessons.

And yesterday in the car, the story came up about that young girl (German, perhaps?) who happened to be vacationing in the tsunami area and was able to warn her parents that it was time to leave before the tidal wave struck.

Which leads to a more general point… We assume that knowledge is cumulative, but that’s only partly true. An awful lot is forgotten. And though it’s a commonplace by now to say that the Egyptians / Aztecs / Etruscans / Huns / Whoever had superior knowledge to us in such-and-such areas, we tend to use that fact as a weapon in multiculturalism arguments rather than to believe it and be shocked by it.