Almost two years ago, I was in Dublin to give a day of talks on the subject with which I have been identified: the soul. The day went well, for me anyway, and the next day I found myself walking through a wondrous Wicklow forest with my host Mark Reynolds. Our wives and children were with us and as we strolled among old oaks, we talked about the place and our work. Mark, who organises events in Ireland on the theme of spirituality, looked at me with unusual seriousness and asked if I would consider writing a book about the Irish soul.
Mark's simple suggestion stirred up buried feelings and inspired me. Months later, our family packed our bags with the indispensable books, paint brushes, stuffed animals, and a few clothes, to move to the Dublin area. At first I resisted the idea of writing about Ireland. I was especially worried about being an American, a foreigner, telling extremely sophisticated people who they are and what they should do. Americans have a bad habit of doing that sort of thing, a tendency I find particularly embarrassing.
But Mark and many others told me not to worry. An outsider's point of view might be just what is needed. In fact, many people confided that Ireland needs reflection on where it is going and what it might be losing amid the thrills of economic success.
When we first arrived, my daughter had trouble in school. She is a bright redhead, a star in the Steiner school at home, where she has learned to milk cows, tend chickens, ride horses, dance, knit, walk knowingly through nature, speak a little French and German and perform circus stunts.
The Steiner philosophy recommends that children learn social and physical skills first and get to know the natural world, leaving the later years for the abstractions of words and numbers. We had discussed her educational background with the principal and at her request I wrote a long letter to her teacher. But on the first day of school, she was reprimanded for not writing her letters on a line and for not being up to par in her reading and maths.
She had never known anything but nurturing and tender guidance. So our first crisis appeared in an area I had expected to work out easily. I had spent two years studying philosophy in a Servite priory in Co Tyrone, many centuries ago it seems, and had a high estimation of Irish education.
But in those first weeks after we arrived, I also read newspaper articles and saw TV programmes about the many people who had been emotionally hurt by a school system not immune to cruelty. I see the intelligence of the Irish people all around me. The US seems generally unconscious in comparison. But I wonder if that smartness has been bought at a price. I don't know.
My stepson had no trouble adjusting to school, and my daughter found a different school - I was touched by the harried principal's quick welcome to her - where her fine teacher has all the best of Steiner and of Irish intellect. Both children blossomed and had a good time - two happy children absorbing the magic of Ireland. I don't use that phrase lightly, by the way. I'll get into it later.
When I lived in Ireland in the 1960s, I visited Dublin many times, saw my relatives in Co Tipperary, and went on holiday in Co Donegal. In Dublin, I was taken under his wing by Thomas McGreevy, a remarkable poet in a land of poets and father confessor to Joyce and Beckett and intimate of W. B. and Jack Yeats. He tried to put some culture in me in those days when I was too young to really know what was happening. But I did get from him a good dose of Irish sophistication and culture.
Of course, the new Ireland is a different country. Like many locals and visitors, I see the good and the bad in recent developments.
It's heartening to sense the new degree of pride, vitality, worldliness and hope among many in Ireland today. This spirit was missing when I lived here before; at least, I never saw it. But other aspects of the new vitality are worrying indeed: the continuing poverty, the drugs, the threat to nature, the loss of religion, the aimlessness and loss of civility in the young, the homogenisation of culture seen in new buildings and the haunting ravages of the automobile in accidents, congestion and the paving of the green.
I have written several books on the soul, and I have no doubt that the Irish are well supplied with it. I use the word to refer to something entirely different from, though intimately related to, spirit. Spirit is that drive into the future, the sense of moving, getting ahead, knowing what's going on and being part of the action. Spirit is the active, visionary, far-reaching side of human feeling that is perfectly imaged by the Greeks as a young man who flies too high in his ambition, leaving the earth behind: Icarus.
The deep soul, in contrast, often turns lovingly to the past, as did the Italian Renaissance intellectuals and artists who gave new life to old ideas they discovered through their impassioned researches. The life of the soul is slow, downward, deep, connected, entangled, local and full of fantasy and imagination. It doesn't enjoy facts nearly as much as stories.
It basks in tradition and finds its heaven in family and neighbourhood and the unchanging, haunting figurations of nature. It's been compared to a cave, a mist and a valley. It's found raw in dreams and disguised in the tangles and mysteries of marriage and divorce. It seems to come into its own in failures and endings and "stuckness", which are taken as opportunities for initiation.
Now, this soul gives us our humanity, and ultimately, makes life worth living. It mingles with spirit, so that in the music and dancing of a cΘil∅ it may be impossible to sort out the soul stuff from the spirit. It's in the old stories and the old buildings and the old roads and farms. Animals embody its variations - a cow ruminating, a fox dashing and a chicken incubating.
Given all this, I'm worried about Ireland gradually losing pieces of its soul to the high spiritedness of the fast-evolving culture. Soul is not lost in one burst by committee decision or political decree. It erodes gradually, when in one town the people decide to put up a car park where there was once a mass of old tangled trees in which children played and visitors marvelled.
It disappears without notice as an old building is torn down so that a new complex of narcissistic glass and icarian sky-scrapers can go up. It's lost when animals disappear from the earth or from the farms that not so long ago educated the imaginations of all of us and have long been precious chapels of nature surrounding the increasing secularism of our cities.
Is this all romantic tripe? Certainly the soul thrives in a romantic approach to life. But I'm not advocating a Luddite retreat into the past. All that is required is care, care of the soul, some halting reflection, so that the enthusiasm of the spirit doesn't destroy all the resources of soul that we have.
In The Dead, Joyce says that the Irish have three virtues: humour, humanity and hospitality. I would add more, all of which serve the soul: storytelling, nature, magic, music, language and sheer fun.
Of course, all of these create a rebound of shadow - depression, loneliness, alcoholism, violence, difficulties between the sexes, long-standing social divisions and political argumentativeness. But these shadow qualities are only the raw material for more soul. They ask for constant attention and conversation so they can transform into new good stuff through the alchemy of reflection.
In my own imagination, the Irish have strong roots in an ancient past of magic and enchantment. I use this last word thoughtfully, naming an alternative to the rationalistic and mechanistic philosophies that have turned the world into a vast machine and corporation.
The Irish are among a select few remaining on the earth in whom an alternative, soul-filled approach to ordinary living is still alive.
Magic can offer a way of being in this world with the satisfaction of power and the joy of creativity without the anxiety of egotism. The Italian humanists tried to restore a magical way of life, which they saw as part of a return to natural religion, a base for their traditional beliefs. When I first thought of writing about Ireland, I was drawn to the old tale telling the contest between King Laoghaire and St Patrick. In that story both are magicians, and the victory of Patrick doesn't entail the complete overthrow of Druid natural magic.
I sense this ancient Druid sensibility in the Irish today and it is for this reason - the all-important magic that streams through contemporary Irish art and music and literature - that I hope the people will protect their natural landscapes and keep their traditional stories and refuse to enter unthinkingly and wholeheartedly into the mechanistic life that offers its lures like a devil bargaining for the Irish soul.
As the magus has taught for millennia, magic derives from the natural world.
Allow nature to be disfigured in a maddened attempt at control and understanding and for unnecessary affluence and financial gain, and the magic will disappear. The Irish will be reduced, like the rest of modernist society, to hyperactive brains in demystified bodies on trashy terrains.
How important are the old sites scattered throughout Ireland - the dolmens, the stone circles, the cairns and the fairy forts. They represent the base of the deep natural religion that has created and sustained this people and even creatively coloured its Christianity. Lose that concrete memory of antiquities and sacred places to tourism and development and another major portion of the Irish soul will disappear.
Care for the natural world is the mirror version of caring for our bodies.
This world sustains our spirit, not only our material lives. And tending the ancient sacred sites is like remembering our families.
These simple rites nurture our humanity and prevent us from becoming mere extensions of the machines that feed the heartless brand of capitalism that has evolved.
We have to protect them, one by one, day by day, one decision after another.
When I was preparing to come here, an American friend, a sophisticated writer who had lived in Dublin for a number of years, told me: "Ireland is gone. You won't find it there". Well, I don't think it has disappeared. I still see it in the people I deal with every day, and I still find it in the natural landscape and in the vitality and beauty of the cities and towns, but it could disappear. Many conversations I have had this year have included references to the changes taking place in Irish life and character.
One of the problems in the contemporary surge of culture towards computerisation and globalisation is the perception that it is preordained by cultural evolution. Most people seem to be Darwinists, assuming that nothing can be done to change the course of these developments. I fear this spirit of resignation more than anything.
It simply isn't true that we have no choice. Ireland could dip into its reservoir of eccentricity and originality, its tough spirit and love of the wild, and be radical in its refusal to become a bland follower in a worldwide religion of futurism. It could be unreasonably strong in protecting its land and its heritage. It could turn its accustomed neutrality and individualism into a refusal to participate in the madness of modernism.
I know that Ireland is too intelligent to move back into the past. But it appears that Ireland is like every other country in that it can't seem to resist the illusions presented by a brave new world of electronics and information. This small island that produced Yeats, Joyce and Beckett, Bono and SinΘad O'Connor and countless other intellectually rugged men and women - a disproportionately long list of original artists - cannot succumb, one hopes, to the Procrustean knife of contemporary consumerism.
Back home in the US, I read everywhere about Irish spirituality. People all over the world are looking to Ireland for its reservoir of spirituality, hoping to siphon off what they can to feed their souls which have become hungry for something other than consumerism and computers. But when I settle with my family in the Dublin area, all I read and hear about is how Ireland is becoming that other world. People hungry for spirit are looking avidly to Ireland and Ireland is looking voraciously to them.
Facing the challenge of absorption into worldwide values marks a moment of potential maturing. Countries go through rites of passage just as individuals do, and these transitions are full of trials. The newspapers today make clear what these initiations entail: equal distribution of wealth, the loss of a comforting homogeneity in race and nationality, an intelligent approach to preserving the natural environment and antiquities, good housing and medical care for all, religious and spiritual sophistication and education that is far deeper than mere training.
When individuals go through rites of passage, perhaps the most obvious sign of change lies in their sexuality. Marriages break up and people act out.
Ireland seems to be following the usual pattern. Sexual containment is giving way to sexual exuberance and excess. From Temple Bar to the country house, sexual confusion will probably increase as the period of change intensifies. It will no doubt elicit moral outrage and defiant rebellion. Such a period of change will generate moralism and puritanism but these reactions will do no good. Nothing changes without serious falling apart.
What is needed is not control or reaction but whatever wisdom can be mustered. Conversation, reflection, artistic representation, dialogue, cultural criticism - these keep the soul engaged in what is otherwise largely a movement of runaway spirit.
I refer to the new spirit in Ireland as the Celtic Tyger, recalling William Blake's popular poem: "Tyger, tyger burning bright, In the forests of the night, What Immortal hand or eye, Could frame thy fearful symmetry?"
The Celtic Tyger is a flaming beast, a mystery spirit that could charge this land with new vitality while not destroying its priceless past. But it is not just an economic spirit, it signals a profound change of lifestyle and values. And it's not only full of promise, it's loaded with dangers. It's a profound mystery that can't be understood fully or directed and controlled - all the more reason to approach it with caution and respect, not with hubris and naive optimism.
I have decided, as a writer, not to take on this particular tyger. The complexity of the Irish psyche is beyond me and my capacities.
I hope to find ways to celebrate the ancient soul and offer some warnings and suggestions, as I'm doing here. But I'm wary of this alluring tyger. It could announce a new era of creativity but it could just as well inaugurate a period of false hope and cultural decadence. I have faith in the deep ground of Ireland. Perhaps this new temptation will pass over, or perhaps the people will know how to absorb its subtle energy without being swallowed into its flaming body.
Thomas Moore is the author of several bestselling books including Care of the Soul and SoulMates