On the Irish...

Thomas Cahill believes that the Irish are the only reason we can still read...or at least that's how I would sum up his book, "How the Irish Saved Civilization." This paragraph struck me as particularly pertinent to our class:

“[I]n the dreams of a people, if we can read these aright, lie their most profound fears and their most exalted aspirations. We know something of Irish dreams, for we can piece together their mythology – their collective dream-story – from the oral tales of the pre-Christian period (such as the Tain) that were subsequently written down and from the artifacts uncovered by archaeologists. Since neither the tales nor the artifacts can offer us a whole mythology – the complete Irish dream cycle – we must read these materials as if they were the fragments of a great papyrus.”