Dream a little dream for me

The experience of reading this book was an odd one. I have to admit I was dreading it a bit. Thankfully, Henry Glassie is a delightful writer. His writing was lyrical and he has a real gift with creating powerful scenes.

My joy in his writing is also the problem I have with the book. I never lost the feeling that his deep affection for these people and this place turned the people of Ballymenone into characters. They were interesting, vivid characters. But they no longer felt like people inhabiting the space of real life. Instead, they turned into Fae creatures for me. Not quaint, but nearly alien in the silence and deep night time darkness of Ballymenone. Perhaps that's a consequence of my own sound and light filled existence. But it still struck me as problematic.

Further, I found his writing hypnotic and it turns each scene into something dreamlike. I actually fell asleep quite a few times reading this book, but not because I was bored or tired. I found myself lulled to sleep by the stillness of the scene in my head and I would continue dreaming the scene only to awake and found that I had conjured up the majority of what I thought I was learning. It was such a strange and delightful experience. But in the end, the “everyday” of the people of Ballymenone began to feel too special, too focused upon. I know that ethnography has a way of making the mundane into the exotic, but for me that seems to defeat the purpose of the whole endeavor.

All of that is a way of saying that I think his writing was so lovely that I found it distracting. Would that all writers be cursed the same.

Josh Zimmerman