Putting Two and Two Together

Two men chatting in a County Down farmyard.Two brothers in a passing car.Two boys sitting in a room, bored and restless.Two parents sipping tea and wondering how soon they can go home.Two elderly ladies, white-haired, their faces deeply lined, lamenting bygone days.

Five apparently ordinary pairings, nothing exciting or alluring about them. They’d be easily dismissed as trivial, if not boring. Yet, for me, they constitute a mini-constellation in the inner sky of memory that keeps catching my attention. Their relative positions trace out a kind of pentagram. It glimmers with the promise of meaning’s elusive magic; something that might illuminate what passes and mark out a navigable route through time.

I can’t think of any straightforward label to describe what I’m writing here, nor can I explain why one side effect of writing it has been a tendency to think in twos, so I’ve started simply by listing five of the pairs I’ve found, or into which my musings have cleaved things. As so often, it’s difficult to tell for sure what’s there independently of our scrutiny and what owes its shape to the touch of our perceptions upon it.

This piece of writing is an essay (though it could as easily be a meditation, memoir, narrative, or history). But the original resonance of “essai” must be emphasized, with a nod to Montaigne, stressing the sense in which it indicates an attempt, an experiment, a try (and an important characteristic of tries is that they often fail). What am I trying to weave, then, in this piece of prose? I want to bring two moments into alignment, to see more clearly the context in which they’re embedded and through which, perhaps, they’ll point a way to a better understanding of the nature of part and whole and the linkages that suture them together.

Neither moment was particularly important. For some reason that I can’t yet fathom, they’ve acted together in a way that neither, taken singly, would have done. It’s as if, put side by side, they’ve become reciprocal catalysts. Once charged with each other’s energy, they exert a kind of magnetism that pulls to them all kinds of thoughts and feelings, reminiscences and reflections.

The two men chatting in a farmyard are standing just outside the looming cavern of an open-sided barn. They were taking shelter there from the heavy rain that only stopped its clamorous downpour a minute or so earlier. Water makes the road’s black surface sheen and glare. All around, there are drips still running off the rain-washed leaves, glinting in the sudden sunshine. Beneath the trees and hedges, it would seem as if the cloudburst hadn’t yet shed all its load.

The men stare at the car that’s moving at a snail’s pace past the entrance to the farm. The concrete-surfaced yard is separated from the road by a vertically barred black metal gate that’s been left wide open, tied back to its gatepost with a coil of orange cord. Their expression as they watch the car is one of surprise, suspicion, curiosity, fear, and hostility. This is no doubt partly due to the infrequency of traffic on this very minor road. It’s as much a lane or track, really, as it is a public thoroughfare, so it would be easy to see passing strangers as trespassers. But their expression is also sparked by the fact that the car’s occupants are showing such intense interest in the pebble-dashed farmhouse that faces the road and backs onto the barn. Not only have they slowed their vehicle to stare, but the man sitting beside the driver has opened his window. He points a camera out and starts to take pictures.

This moment that I’ve just sketched out happened in the Country Down countryside a few miles from the village of Moira, a name probably derived from the Irish “Maigh Rath,” which is open to two interpretations: “plain of the ring forts,” or “plain...