It is not done, in this society, to talk about the emotions in public print. Talk about the Ansbacher accounts or Canon Law or the likely outcome of the Limerick East by-election. But the realm of feeling, that's for gushy women's magazines.
This is a place, after all, where people dread the Sign of Peace coming up at Mass. Smiling, touching, being sincere, it is all too Californian.
And Christmas, well, at Christmas you need a few drinks to get you through. Often, above the mad ruck of collective geniality you catch a glimpse of a bleak face. "When can I get out of this?" it is saying to itself.
This is a time of year to think with tenderness about the bits of human lives that are lost, left behind, unrecorded, behind the facade of achieved adulthood.
Christmas is essentially backward-looking. And it is full of secret feelings. It is about a birth: yet in the real world, once childhood is past, it turns on reminiscence, not anticipation.
I suppose there are those who can look on the ghosts of Christmas past with equanimity. But there is surely nearly always an element of conscious loss.
Were the lights of Christmas not brighter once? The surrounding dark not more thrillingly dark? Were we not more ardent people? How it used to be is much more powerful than how it is. As so often.
There doesn't have to be such a disjunction between our public and private selves. We could be more whole. And not everything that is merely personal has to be disowned by us as we go along, as we `progress.'
We're not just passive consumers of the culture we live in: we contribute to it, too. We can insist that this or that part of the personal is revalued, in public, by everybody.
Take, and this is hardly the example you were expecting, old-fashioned Irish boarding-schools. Men and women now in their prime would look on schooldays in those places as hugely important and formative.
By extension, the old schools are important in the millions of lives which have been influenced by the men and women who were influenced by them. But because the history of schools is not part of war or politics or business, it might as well never have been. No one attends to its many and fascinating cultures.
I did a risky thing this autumn, I went to a reunion of the girls I was in class with in boarding-school many years ago. The reunion was in a hotel in Dublin. They'd arranged a Mass to begin the evening and, in an adolescent sulk at not being consulted, I decided I wouldn't go to that.
Just like any adolescent I was stuck with the gesture nobody knew I was making. I found myself standing outside the conference room where they were celebrating the Mass, listening.
They sang. There's nothing as potent, Noel Coward said, as cheap music. It has to be cheap, apparently: a string quintet won't bring on the reminiscent tear the way a phrase of an old ballad will.
They sang a school hymn. It wasn't of itself cheap music, of course. By coincidence, I've been listening to a new tape called Sacred Memories: The Sisters of Saint Louis sing a selection of motets and hymns, with Gerard Gillen at the organ, which shows just how fine the music we heard at school really was.
But the ragged sound of mature women singing a half-remembered girls' hymn, unaccompanied, in that hotel room opened Coward's floodgates. The unofficial, not the authorised, version of our schooldays asked to be recalled and, if at all possible, to be valued.
Take the secret languages we used. I wrote about one of them not long ago, the language of `crushes' on older girls and nuns. All the boarding schools must have had a romantic scene and a vocabulary for it. These languages would be underground things. Nobody would know where they came from. Nobody would quite understand how they were handed down.
Since their purpose was to obscure, they would be the nearest ordinary girls and boys would ever get to speaking something like a thieves' lingo. In my boarding-school the girls with the crushes were called "dafties," and a meeting with the loved one a "soiree."
Why these words? What were the words in other schools? Has any linguistic institute funded a research project to record these specialised vocabularies? Is there a postgraduate student going around studying their links with, say, the orders of nuns and monks who ran the schools, and their geographical provenance and their customs?
Did the inner culture of schools change with the surge of energy at Irish independence, and later reflect the increasing emotional repression of everyday life in Ireland? Or were boarding schools always timeless little empires, floating in the sea of de Valera's Ireland, their only role models non-native, Tom Brown's Schooldays or Angela of the Upper Fourth?
When people are on their deathbeds I don't suppose that many of them say things like, "I always thought the constitutionality of Articles 2 and 3 should be tested."
I think they say, "I did not cheat in that exam and you shouldn't have hit me," and they say, "I saw what I'd asked Santa Claus for on top of the wardrobe" and they say "You never loved me anyway."
But look for any evidence of the affective life on the record and you'd be hard put to find it. You grow up, and you still haven't got over not being picked for the A team, and you still hate the boy who was, and there you are, both paunchy grandfathers, slapping each other on the back over mulled wine and mince pies.
Of course you can manage perfectly well without an authentically happy self most of the year. But at Christmas you're supposed to be able to rejoice on cue. To observe the rapture of children and not envy it, to be happy and to spread happiness around.
You're supposed to be able to summon up intensities again, but in a nice way.
Going through the icy dark morning to the train back to Dublin from school for Christmas. Coming out of Amiens Street Station and seeing crimson paper bells suspended over pyramids of biscuit-boxes in shop-windows. Fowl sent up from the country falling out of stained newspaper wrappings.
You're supposed still to be in touch with excitement as physical as nausea. Try to be. Mark my words: the next few years will see the entrance of the feelings into public life. The reaction to Princess Diana's death was a portent. If the very thought makes you go "yuck," then maybe there's something wrong with you. Maybe your more Christmassy self was beaten or mocked out of you somewhere along the way.
School, probably. But you could practise feelings this week. After all, when the Godhead took on humanity it took on all of it, childish credulity, adolescent passion, middle-aged regret and all.