A few years ago, when I interviewed the playwright Tom Murphy, he described to me a childhood memory which chimed with one of my own. He told me about how his father, a carpenter who worked much of the year in England, would bring with him, on his occasional visits home, some books which he would never find time to read before he had to go away again. He had this memory of his father sitting in a chair caressing the covers of his books, in much the same way as, on other occasions, he would see him run his hands along a smooth piece of timber.
For Tom Murphy it was an image of famine, of the longing for that which was lost, of the grief at that loss and of the deep sense of what it meant. I understood this to provide much of the explanation for why Murphy became a playwright.
The image still affects me, because my own childhood contained a similar experience. My father used to collect books, which he kept in a special room upstairs. There was a bit of everything there from thermodynamics to Shakespeare, several Bibles, Charles Dickens and a hundred books about gardens.
He had gathered them mainly at auctions in the big houses around the county, after the Ascendancy had fled or died away. I always thought of it as repossession, reclaiming that which had been taken. His intention was not that he would have these books to benefit himself, but to hand on, so that, maybe in a generation or more, the means would be there to dispel the hunger.
I still have many of these books. Certain among them stand out for their beauty as artefacts, for their proven ability to live through generations, seemingly unaffected by the passage of time. I treasure, in particular, my father's books of local history: The O'Conors of Connaught, "Compiled from a ms. of the late John O'Donovan, LL.D.", published in 1891 by Hodges, Figgis, Grafton Street, and the Saorstat Eireann Official Handbook, published by the Talbot Press, Dublin, 1932.
There is some quality of these books that remained slightly intangible to me until I read recently Robert Bly's wonderful work, The Sibling Society, in which he explores the difference between what he calls the vertical and the horizontal planes of culture.
He quotes the Native American philosophy that, when one makes a decision, one should think of its effects down to the seventh generation. This notion of the sanctity of tradition (vertical culture) he compares unfavourably to the modern tendency to seek to address only one's contemporaries (horizontal culture); hence, "sibling" society.
And if there is a single unenduring symbol of the Sibling Society, it must surely be the paperback book, which today crams the shelves of even the most erudite scholar, representing literature not as life-saving culture but as marketing combat, the gaudy, ephemeral covers vying for our attention, signifying the battle to the death that leaves nothing behind.
THESE were among the ideas flitting around behind The Whoseday Book, the anthology-cum-millennium-diary-cum-thought-for-the-day-prayerbook which is published next Sunday by the Irish Hospice Foundation (IHF). It seemed right that we, in our generation, should do something to combat the epidemic of horizontalism which besets us, and hand on at least one book to our children which would be fit to stroke like a piece of timber in a hundred years.
The content of the book reflects this aspiration also, as indeed, most profoundly, does the worthy cause of palliative care in Ireland, for which the project is intended to raise funds.
The contributions from 366 writers, artists and selected public figures are intended as a representation of the collective mood at this moment in time, to be savoured, of course, on their allotted days in the year 2000; but also beyond, in times when the formal record of our time will provide mostly mysteries. But the editorial content of the book is just the foundation of what will, for each individual possessor or family, become with the passing months of 2000 a richly personalised keepsake.
The Whoseday Book is an interactive book, in the technological and the more everyday sense. The book will be accessible via the Internet, but more importantly can be used in the family context as a journal of the year 2000, providing a focal point for a daily recording of impressions, thoughts and occasions relating to the family's collective life. This is one millennium project which will meet the requirement of the National Millennium Committee chairman, Seamus Brennan, that it remind people of the solemnity of the millennium moment "long after the champagne has run out".
The instructions to the contributors were deliberately couched in vague terms, so as not to constrain or force hands. And yet, an amazing proportion of the contributors submitted pieces that gravitate around a theme of continuity, of life and death, or rather death and life, of hopes for the future, often the future they will bequeath their children.
Robert Bly, in outlining his thesis, quoted the Romanian writer, Ciorin: "Now that no one believes in the afterlife, everyone writes." A, perhaps ironic, suggestion that writing is an attempt to achieve an immortality that is otherwise disbelieved. But "immortality" is perhaps the more venal horizontal equivalent of "eternality", a richer and yet more humble objective: the goal of immortality cleansed of ego.
There is a profound connection between this creative, yes, hunger for the eternal and the extraordinary work of the hospice movement. For hospice is about acceptance with hope, the antithesis of resignation.
Hospice care is about life, not death, and very much about honouring those who have died by comforting and cherishing those who have yet to die, which excludes nobody. Hospice gives unconditionally, with no expectation of return. The debt we owe therefore to people such as the IHF founder and patron, Dr Mary Redmond, is immense and unrepayable.
John Waters is an author, playwright and columnist with this newspaper
