Yes and the mist crept in off the Liffey this morning two degrees and the city wrapped in gauze like a bandage over a wound that never quite heals and I thought standing at the window with the cold pressing its grey palm flat against the glass I thought of them up there. Four souls in a capsule no bigger than a sitting room hurtling moonward and the whole of Florida blazing beneath them as they rose. Artemis they call it. After the huntress. The Greeks had a word for everything and we have rockets for everything and still the fog will not lift from the quays.
Fifty years since a man last turned his face toward that pale disc. Fifty years. A man could be born and grow old and die and be buried in Glasnevin in fifty years and never once look up. But they looked up last night in Florida and the fire caught and the thing rose shuddering on its column of light and four astronauts – one of them a woman, one of them Black, all of them mortal – went arcing over the Atlantic toward that old companion of lovers and lunatics and poets. Ten days they will be gone. Ten days circling the moon like a thought that cannot land.
And below them, far below, the earth shook. Off the coast of Ternate – say it, Ternate, let the word roll like a marble in the mouth – magnitude seven point four and the sea drew back its breath. Indonesia. The Molucca Sea convulsing in the small hours. Tsunami warnings issued then lifted like a sentence commuted. The plates beneath us shifting always shifting and we build our cities on the skin of a drum.
It puts me in mind of what Bloom said or what I had Bloom say which is the same thing in the end. We walk upon the crust of a volcano. Every step an act of faith. Every morning a minor resurrection.
And in the courts of Washington a different kind of tremor. The President himself – Trump, the name blunt as a fist – sat in the gallery of the Supreme Court to watch them argue over who belongs. Birthright citizenship. The fourteenth amendment. If you are born on this soil are you of this soil. The justices sceptical it seemed of the challenge and the President there watching from his chair like a man attending his own trial though he would not see it so. Who belongs and who does not. We knew something of that in Dublin. We knew the taste of that particular bread.
And later that same evening he addressed the nation on the war. Iran. He spoke for nineteen minutes which is not long enough to explain a war and too long to say nothing. The goals nearly achieved he said. Two to three weeks of hard strikes ahead he said. Twelve thousand three hundred targets already hit said the generals. And in Isfahan the smoke rose in a column over the ancient city and the embers drifted like orange snow. The Strait of Hormuz held by the Revolutionary Guard or so they claimed and the oil markets trembling and in Tokyo they calculated the cost to the yen and in every capital the telephones rang and rang.
Meanwhile in Wuhan – no, not Wuhan, it was another city, a Chinese city where the robot taxis stopped. A hundred of them at least. Baidu's autonomous fleet seized up in the middle of traffic like mechanical donkeys refusing to move. Picture it. A hundred cars with no drivers sitting dumb in the intersections and the human beings behind them leaning on their horns and the algorithms somewhere in their silicon minds encountering some condition they had not been taught to parse. The ghost in the machine had a seizure. And the traffic backed up for hours and the company said nothing because what could they say. We built minds that cannot think their way through a Tuesday afternoon.
Joyce would have loved it. I would have loved it. The comedy of the mechanical. The hubris of the automatic. Reuben J. Dodd's son jumped into the Liffey and was fished out for a florin and here we are fishing robot cars out of the intersection for rather more than a florin I should think.
In Cape Town – and here the mist in Dublin thickens as if in sympathy – seventy per cent of the housing in the city centre is for tourists. Seventy. The people who live there, the people who make the beds and cook the breakfasts and sweep the floors, they live hours away in townships where the army has now been deployed against the gangs. A city hollowed out for visitors. A stage set. I think of the Martello tower and how we made it a museum and how the living are always being displaced by the commemorated. The soldiers patrol the townships and the tourists photograph the mountain and between them is a distance that cannot be measured in kilometres.
And in Larissa – Larissa! – the trial began at last. The Greek train crash. Fifty-seven dead in 2023 and now in 2026 the families crowd into a courtroom too small to hold their grief. Thirty-six accused. A trial expected to last years. Years. The dead have been dead three years already and justice moves slower than a funeral procession. The families pressed together on the benches and outside the courthouse the spring came on regardless as spring does even in Greece even when the railways have failed and the signals were wrong and two trains met on a single track in the dark.
SpaceX meanwhile filed its papers for the stock exchange. Musk – another blunt name, it smells of something, musk, the animal secretion, the base note – Musk will be the first trillionaire they say. A trillion. Write it out. One followed by twelve zeros. A number so large it becomes abstract, becomes theological. What does a man do with a trillion. He goes to Mars perhaps. He builds his rocket and he goes. And the rest of us stand in the mist at two degrees watching the fog curl over the Ha'penny Bridge and we think well at least we have the bridge. At least we have the river. At least the Liffey still runs to the sea as it did when I was a boy as it did when Bloom walked its banks as it will when the last trillionaire has built his last rocket and gone.
The mist this morning in Dublin at two degrees and the world turning as it turns and the news coming in as it comes in wave after wave like the sea at Sandymount and I standing here or sitting here or lying here it makes no difference trying to hold it all in the mind at once the moon mission and the earthquake and the war and the robot cars and the displaced and the bereaved and the trillionaire and the fog the fog the fog yes and through it all the city breathing its cold breath and the seagulls calling over the rooftops and somewhere a church bell and somewhere a door opening and somewhere someone stepping out into the morning saying yes I will yes.
