you will never solve the Irish

"Your reason for being in Ireland?" The inspector licked his pencil and indelibled his pad.
"Reason has nothing to do with it," I blurted.
His pencil stayed, while his gaze lifted.
"That's a grand start, but what does it mean?"
"Madness."
He leaned forward, pleased, as if a riot had surfed at his feet.
"What kind would that be?" he asked politely.
"Two kinds. Literary and psychological. I am here to flense and render down the White Whale."
"Flense." He scribbled. "Render down. White Whale. That would be Moby Dick, then?"

Some time after I came back to my home country after four years in the enchanted land called the Emerald Isle, I picked up a little book by Ray Bradbury (famous of course for, among others, Fahrenheit 451). It wasn't a novel, strictly speaking, more of a memoir of a certain time in the writer's life, but the magic in it made it seem like part fiction, part dream.

It was called Green Shadows, White Whale and described Bradbury's adventures in Ireland in the Fifties when he was there to write a screenplay. Bradbury discovered the same thing about the country as I did: there is magic in it, obvious even to a person who doesn't believe in that sort of thing. Ireland in the Fifties was very different than the Ireland I knew but my heart jumped in joyful recognition.

Books about another era than my own usually fail to engage me - I can't seem to relate to anything outside my own time - but this strange little book is still one of my favourites. 

"...you will never probe, find, discover or in any way solve the Irish. We are not so much a race as a weather. X-ray us, yank our skeletons out by the roots, and by morn we've regrown the lot. You're right, with all you've said!"
"Am I?" I said, astonished.
The inspector drew up his own list behind his eyelids:
"Coffee? We do not roast the bean - we set fire to it! Economics? Music? They go together here. For there are beggars playing unstrung banjos on O'Connell Bridge; beggars trudging Pianolas about St. Stephen's Green, sounding like cement mixers full of razor blades. Irish women? All three feet high, with runty legs and pig noses. Lean on them, sure, use them for cover against the rain, but you wouldn't seriously chase them through the bog. And Ireland itself? Is the largest open-air penal colony in history ... a great racetrack where the priests lay odds, take bets, and pay off on Doomsday. Go home, lad. You'll dislike the lot of us!"