The Quill Issue 4

The School of English Newsletter

February 2016

Trinity College Dublin Congratulations to the winner of our creative writing competition!

Thank you to all who entered our first ever creative writing competition, and an even bigger thanks to Dr Philip Coleman for judging the entries! We are proud to announce the winning entry has been chosen, and it is…

Saturnalian by Will Fleming The poem is featured inside on page seven. Will Fleming is a Junior Sophister student of English Literature and Philosophy based in Dublin, currently on a study exchange in Amherst, Massachusetts. His work has been published in Icarus and The Attic. Congratulations are also in order for the runner up, Katherine Finnegan and her piece entitled The Wedding Day. All of the entries were of an exceptionally high standard, so congratulations and best of luck in the future to all those who entered.

Who are we?

In This Issue

The Quill is written and run by Trinity English students, aided by Freshman Senior Executive Officer, Diane Sadler. We hope that this newsletter becomes a valued companion for those with a lust for literature and encourages you to get your Quill and write!

Our first issue of 2016 includes interviews with writers Thomas Morris and Richard Ford, as well as contributions from Bernice Murphy, Adam Hanna and Ema Vyroubalova. As always, we have our student contributions and of course our glorious competition!

Want to write for us? Don’t be shy, we would love to hear from you!

We need students to contribute in every way - writers, interviewers, artists, reviewers, poets, and anything else you have a special talent for. Whether you’d like to join the editorial team or just submit a once off piece, get in touch with us through email: TheQuill@tcd.ie It’s an opportunity for everyone to practice their writing skills and get their voice heard!

Author, Editor and Trinity Alumnus Thomas Morris, Knows What He’s Doing.

Ten years after moving to Dublin at the tender age of nineteen to read English Literature and Philosophy in Trinity College, author Thomas Morris admits that he is still finding his way around the Fair City. Morris sat down with The Quill to discuss his critically acclaimed debut, We Don’t Know What We’re Doing- a collection of short stories; his writing process, as well as his time here in Trinity.

The front cover of his debut is striking. Morris has moved away from the trend of having a large title and author’s name; instead he decorates the cover with snapshots of the characters of the collection, something which suits the nature of the book. Not wanting it to be “too London”, Morris attempts to capture the eccentricities of Caerphilly, the author’s hometown in Wales, in which nine of the ten stories are set.

Having always had an interest in a sense of place and existentialism, Morris asserts that setting his debut in his hometown was not always the plan. Rather, it came about through his exploration of place and how a character’s psychology can be captured by the way in which they interact with their environment. Morris describes how in the past, he had always placed his characters in rooms and admits that technically, “he did not know how to get them out of these rooms. They kept walking into doors”. Although he was initially reluctant to set the stories in Caerphilly, Morris realised that it made more sense to do so. He knew the layout and landscape, which enabled the characters to interact with their environment in a myriad of ways. The setting remains constant as the reader encounters a variety of characters whose description and means of interaction with their environment is often a reflection on their own personality. Morris admits that this nuanced approach was only made possible by spending time away from Caerphilly so that he could reflect on its peculiarities. However, Morris also found the need to revisit his hometown to refresh his memory of its foibles and escape the “bubble of university life” for a while. This allowed him to re-engage with how a different set of people are living their lives, something that Morris regards as a crucial part of his writing process.

Morris likes to play with perspective and voice. This can be seen throughout the collection as the narrative voice and tense of the story change. He explains that the effect that modifying the tense and person narrative has on a text is always something that has been of interest to him. All The Boys, the only story of the collection that takes place outside Caerphilly, follows a bunch of Welsh lads on a stag party to Dublin. While the story is filled with comedy and chaos, its most memorable feature is the use of the future tense. As Editor of the Stinging Fly Magazine, Morris has noticed the dynamism that is created when one changes the tense- "It conjures a mood conveying the personality of the characters which may have been absent in a different tense”. In All The Boys, the future tense creates a sense of inevitability, the forgone conclusion of drunken antics and the ensuing hangovers that will be nursed by breakfast rolls and paracetamol the next day. Interested in the element of play created in this approach to writing, Morris finds a certain “freedom" within such constraints. While he views this formulaic style as technically difficult at times, wondering -“does this sentence work grammatically?”, Morris says that “once he becomes accustomed to the style of the story, it is often very easy to write”. The accelerated pace of this story sees characters being carried into situations before they are aware of where they are or what they are doing. However All The Boys, stands out for more that its unique form. "It was a lot of fun to write”, Morris remarks, “when the narrator is familiar with a place but the characters are not”. With only a narrative intelligence as their guide, the Caerphilly natives must navigate their way around the foreign lands of Ireland’s capital: Temple Bar, Trinity College, O’Connell Street.

Chekov once said that the short story must be “brief, brief as possible”. Therefore, the author often relies on that which remains unwritten and unsaid something especially appropriate for characters that don’t know what they’re doing!

Morris admits that he has always been drawn to the form of the short story, so much so that he took Dr. Paul Delaney’s module “Irish Short Fiction” twice as a Sophister. Like many authors, “drafting, re-drafting and then re-drafting the redrafts” is a crucial part of the writing process. For Morris, the balance between what is told and left untold changes as the drafts go on. Often, Morris explains, that he tries to craft the reverberations of the act into story, rather than the act itself. It is in the search for this “echo or shimmer”- a crack, that another dimension of the text is revealed to the reader.

When the author allows the reader to get lost in this world, they are giving them the space to interpret things. Morris remarks, “if a reader is constantly being told how to feel, then it is manipulative”. It is in this self-navigation, going beyond the surface, that a rapport is built between the reader and the text. We talk about Irish Literature and its history of the short story, a topic that inevitably leads us to Joyce’s Dubliners. Morris is particularly familiar with Dubliners having edited Dubliners 100, an anthology which invited new and established writers to engage with and celebrate their favourite stories from Joyce’s collection. It was once said in a piece of literary criticism on Dubliners and the short story form that “a short story is successful if you could not imagine telling the story is any other form”. I ask Morris his thoughts on such a statement and he replies that for him, when this happens he knows that he is finished with the story- “This is how it needs to be told”.

The conversation moves from Dubliners to Morris’s own Dublin story and what brought him to Trinity. Bashfully, Morris explains that he wanted an Irish wife and that this is what initially sparked his interest in Ireland. Yet, it seems that Morris’s hometown had already formed links with Dublin's “rich and vibrant” literary scene. It was only when speaking to his secondary school English teacher about the prospect of studying in Trinity, that he learned of how a past pupil, also a literary enthusiast traversed the cobble stoned Front Square. This pupil was no other than Prof. Darryl Jones, Dean of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, who according to his school English teacher, “wasn’t the biggest fan of Jane Austen”! Morris does not think that he would have become a writer had he not moved to Ireland. He explains that his encounters with Irish writers such as Colm Toibín, Patrick McCabe and Roddy Doyle as Chairperson of The Literary Society, in his final year were the catalysts for his career as a writer. Morris admits that he had never met a writer until he was twenty-one and he finally got the opportunity to ask the questions whose answers can’t be found in a textbook. “How did they write, what did they write about and what was life really like as a writer?” These encounters showed Morris that becoming a writer wasn’t an impossible thing. “It was inspiring. If they could make it, why not me?"

Such is Morris’s advice to aspiring writers: “If it happened to me, why not you too?”

Interviewed by Niamh MacSweeney

In conversation with American writer Richard Ford As a writer from the American South, how were you initially drawn to Ireland as a place to live, write, and teach?

Being from "the American south" hardly matters to me or figures in my time in Ireland. Why do we do anything? If you think you know, you're probably wrong (which is why we need imaginative literature...to sort all that out). My grandmother was Irish, an immigrant from County Cavan, which probably only meant that when I found this out (at about age 25), I thereafter knew Ireland existed as a place. I later and for unrelated reasons conceived a romance with Trinity College (possibly I liked the name) and tried -- without success -- to win a Fulbright Fellowship so I could pursue a PhD in Irish studies. I'd read and admired a lot of Irish writing and actually did a course in Yeats at the University of Michigan, and in Joyce at the University of California, both of which acquainted me, among other things, with some bits of early 20th century Irish history -- which interested me. Sometime, then, in the mid-80s, I came to Dublin to publicize a book I'd written, and was fortunate enough to meet people at the Irish Times, who turned out to be John Banville, Gerry Smyth and Eileen Battersby. These acquaintances have lasted and developed. There's also the matter of just liking the place.

What was your experience like at Trinity College?

My experience at Trinity has been rare and splendid. Unlike at any American university where I've had affiliation, I genuinely like and respect my colleagues at Trinity, and have felt that were they not my colleagues, but just were random souls I came upon in life, I'd like them just as much. You can't imagine how uplifting that is. Generally, university teaching works to persuade us that we're not really living the same life the rest of the world is living (and that's not necessarily incorrect). But for me, not to live the life the rest of the world is knowing is a death sentence. Trinity's different in that regard -- at least it's been for me.

Which Irish authors have been particularly interesting to you as a novelist and story writer?

Frank O'Connor. He'd be "my first", from years past. Elizabeth Bowen. Joyce (his stories, not Ulysses). I'm just listing dead people here. The living ones -- Banville is truly, truly extraordinary, Roddy Doyle's the rarest of talents, Toibin's a wonder. I'm very keen on Claire Keegan and on Donal Ryan. But you know, I don't care who's Irish and who's Swedish and who's a Latvian and who's Nepalese. At some point we have to leave that baggage behind to be a great writer. And then we're not talking about the poets, here -- of which there's a great, living wealth in Ireland, some of right here in College. Brendan Kennelly. Gerald Dawe. I also knew Seamus Heaney for a very long time -- since the 70s; it's hard to estimate how influential he was in my reading and writing and my sense of what a writer is. Immense.

You have spent a great deal of time teaching in many different institutions. How do you approach teaching young writers? Has teaching had any marked effect on your writing?

The only "marked effect" teaching has had on my own writing has been to get in my way. Which is probably why I've been affiliated with, as you say, "many different institutions." I tend to duck out when the going gets tough. Other than that, as a teacher of would-be writers, I try to be their enlightened and candid reader. Most people who set out to be great writers aren't going to succeed, so they ought at least to learn how to read, so they can be in the audience for the rare others who do succeed.

Interviewed by Jonathan Creasy

The Theatricality of Irish History Turbulence, mayhem and calamity are words that epitomised the early years of the 20th century in Ireland. The events of the Easter Rising in 1916, the Irish War of Independence and the Irish Civil War all unfolded in rapid succession, playing out as three tragic movements of a complex and forlorn symphony. Given the current decade of centenaries, the nation eagerly awaits how our past events are to be commemorated, particularly in the media.

RTE’s production of Rebellion was met with mixed reviews. The main source of this criticism related to the decision undertaken by the show’s creators to place the focus of the series on their fictionally constructed characters. Pregnancy, adultery, familial tensions, weddings, theft, alcoholism and other formulaic tropes clutter the limited space provided by the five hour-long, weekly episodes. To an extent, the true narrative of the events of the Rising is reduced to a plot structure that exists merely to hold its characters in place. This factor is exemplified in the representation of Padraig Pearse, who occupies a ghostly presence somewhere on the periphery of the story. His passion and rigour for Irish freedom instead translates on the screen into disillusionment and ineffectual leadership. This overcrowding of plot is unnecessary. In short, we’re denied the drama of the truth. As Roy Foster states in RTE’s currently-airing programme 1916, ‘when the first copies of the proclamation are stuck up by Sean T. O’Kelly on lampposts with flour paste, somebody passing by says, “is that a play bill?” which I always think is rather emblematic of what is a very theatrical production’.

This blurring of lines between historical truth and fiction is certainly not a device unique to Rebellion. The 20th Anniversary screening of the 1996 film Michael Collins was held in the Savoy cinema on O’Connell Street on February 20 th and was followed by a panel discussion that involved the main creators of the film. When asked by a member of the audience to reflect on the portrayal of Eamon de Valera by Alan Rickman in the film, Neil Jordan claimed ‘I think we were rather kind to him actually’. The villainous depiction of de Valera in the film has for a while been the subject of much debate. Jordan ‘didn’t ask [Rickman] to be a praying mantis, he just did it naturally’. As several other questions regarding the film’s historical accuracy are raised, Jordan continues to defend his approach. We learn that Ned Broy (Detective Sergeant of the Dublin Metropolitan Police Force who worked as a double agent for Michael Collins) lived into his eighties, contrary to the film in which he was tortured and killed by British forces while the War of Independence was ongoing. The purpose of this decision was one of dramatic licence used in order to mould the film into some form acceptable to Hollywood standards of plot, though this move can arguably be seen as a needless addition atop historically-sound dramatic elements.

Throughout the panel discussion, Neil Jordan noted his own reliance on Tim Pat Coogan’s biography of Michael Collins (Michael Collins: A Biography, 1990) for information, comparing previous biographies written in the immediate aftermath of Collins’ assassination to hagiographies, elevating Collins to a stance of virtual sainthood. Jordan singles out Coogan’s text for its near-accuracy and expresses enthusiasm in researching biographies yet to be published: future works that will determine both how time will impact on Collins’ image and also if history and drama ultimately drift their separate ways.

In the meantime however, Liam Neeson’s narration of 1916 is an indication of the companionship between history and drama and emphasises the difficulty in distilling the salts of historical truths from its dramatic solutions.

By Nora Doorley

Celebrating 10 years of the M.Phil in Popular Literature On Tuesday, the 19th of January, staff and students, past and pr sent gathered to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the M.Phil in Popular Literature in the Long Room Hub. It wasn’t all that long ago that the idea of a Masters-level course in Pop Lit would have been almost unthinkable, but over the last two decades, the subject in all of its generic forms has been transformed from a niche area of academic interest into one of the most vibrant and rapidly growing areas of critical inquiry within literary studies. Established in 2005 by Nicholas Daly and Darryl Jones, the M.Phil in Popular Literature was the first (and for many years, only) dedicated postgraduate course in this subject area.

To date, around 200 students have graduated from the M.Phil. Dozens of our students have gone on to PhD level study, are now conducting academic teaching and research of their own. Our graduates have also established themselves as successful fiction writers, teachers, publishing executives, librarians, and a very wide range of other professions.

We’ve been lucky enough to attract high-quality students from a wide variety of backgrounds. In addition to consistently high numbers of students from Ireland, the USA, and Canada, we have also had class members from India, Singapore, Greece, Holland, Norway, Turkey, Germany, Italy, the UK and Chile. Each class has been distinctive in its own way, but what has been consistent is the enthusiasm, energy, and commitment of our students.

Another strength of the course has always been the fact that all of its lecturers are very active researchers within the field, as well as genuine genre enthusiasts. In addition, the school of English and its staff, both academic and administrative, have always been immensely supportive of the M.Phil.

As well as providing a great chance for former students and staff members to catch up with one another during the wine reception, one of the highlights of the evening was an extremely entertaining and provocative lecture by Professor Scott McCracken from the University of Keele. Scott is one of the leading academic experts on popular fiction, and he made an ideal (and very convivial) guest speaker.

As the M.Phil enters it’s 11th year, we intend to further consolidate our position as the leading taught-masters course in this subject area.

After all, as Frank Luther Mott, one of the first academics to write about the American bestseller, put it back in 1947, ‘Only the cynic and the heedless can disregard popular literature’.

Any final-year TCD students thinking about applying for the 2016/17 academic year are welcome to email Dr. Bernice M. Murphy (murphb12@tcd.ie) for further information.

By Dr. Bernice Murphy

Literature and Revolution: Evening Lecture Series These lectures are organized by the School of English and the Oscar Wilde Centre as part of our program of talks aimed at the general public. The series offered annually in the Hilary Term has a specific theme selected the previous spring by the staff. In the past years we have had a wonderfully diverse range of topics, including Magic and Literature (organized by Dr. Tom Walker), Engaging Poems (organized by Prof. Stephen Matterson), and Disability in Literature (organized by Dr. Paul Delaney).

We chose Literature and Revolution for this year because of the upcoming anniversary of the 1916 Rising but did not want all the talks to be specifically focused on the Rising or on Ireland. The series always seeks to explore the chosen theme across a broad range of literary texts so when I started working on securing speakers for the series I looked for talks on different kinds of revolutions as well as on different kinds of relationships between revolution and literature. I was also hoping that the individual lectures would speak to one another. In the end we scheduled ten talks, which promised to meet these criteria, both collectively and individually.

A trio of lectures related to the Centenary provides a sort of spine for the series: Prof. Eve Patten gave the opening talk on "Novel and 1916"; Prof. Gerry Dawe is speaking in Week 5 about his new book Of War and War's Alarms: Reflections on Modern Irish Writing, 1914-1945; and the series will close with a talk by Prof. Chris Morash "Changed Times: 1916 and Irish Time". Then there is a cluster of talks about literary representations of revolutions from earlier historical periods, which features Dr. Brendan O'Connell on the 1380 Peasant's Revolt in Gower and Chaucer; Dr. David O'Shaughnessy on Edmund Burke and the French Revolution; and Dr. Clare Clarke on H.G. Wells and the Scientific Revolution.

Continued over leaf...

A second group of lectures addresses a spectrum of revolutionary events from the 1960s: Dr. Tom Walker on 1968 in Northern Irish Literature; Prof. Darryl Jones on revolutionary rhetoric of the Beatles; Prof. Sam Slote on Philippe Sollers, Thomas Pynchon and the 1968 student revolutions in France and the US; and finally myself on the literary and cinematic afterlives of the Prague Spring.

Thanks to the tireless work of Sophia Ní Sheoin, the new Executive Officer of the Oscar Wilde Centre, the series has been advertised extensively both on and off campus and all the talks so far have been well attended. We in fact had to move to a larger theatre after the first lecture to accommodate the interest, which surpassed even our originally optimistic projections!

by Dr. Ema Vyroubalová

The Language of Creativity: Interview with MPhil Pop Lit. Alumnus, Jane Kelly In late January Niamh MacSweeney (co-editor of The Quill) and I sat down with the author Jane Kelly in the tranquil setting of Dawson Street’s Costa cafe to discuss her experience of Trinity College’s M. Phil. in Popular Literature. Kelly earned her M. Phil. degree from Trinity in 2008. A Philadelphia native, she has also studied at Boston University, Harvard University and NYU. She is best known for her mystery novels that feature the protagonist, amateur detective, Meg Daniels. Some of her works include: Killing Time in Ocean City, Cape Mayhem, Wrong Beach Island, and most recently, Missing You in Atlantic City.

Q. What brought you to Trinity College Dublin to study the M. Phil in Creative Writing?

A. I had written three books, but really I felt that I needed more expertise in what I was doing. I wanted to see exactly what made popular literature popular. I had been out of school for thirty years when I came across the programme at Trinity. I loved the feel of it. It was free-flowing and less constricted in its structure than others I came across while researching such courses.

I really benefitted from the programme, and afterwards, my writing process did change. I cultivated a greater appreciation for history, and I began to incorporate a historical aspect into my books.

Q. Is there a particular book that stands out as influential to you?

A. I could spend my whole life reading The Battle of Dorking (1871) by George Tomkyns Chesney. It’s a speculative text written in the future. I used to say that The Battle of Dorking changed my life.

Q. Do you have a specific writing process?

A. When it comes to writing, I have a preference for varying environments. I enjoy writing in planes, trains and coffee shops.

Q. What aspect of Popular Literature are you most drawn to?

A. I’m really into mysteries. I don’t like fantasies however. I tried The Lord of the Rings but it’s just not my thing. I think I’m more of a practical person. I’d love to study languages again. I just adore languages.

Jane Kelly’s linguistic abilities are clearly demonstrated with a quick glance at her website, janekellymystery.homestead.com, where a background of learning Japanese and Italian is exhibited. We ask if her fondness for languages helps facilitate the fluidity with which a writer drifts between personalities and identities, to which she agrees wholeheartedly. She asserts how enjoyable it is to be able to experience different perspectives in wholly different settings and she expresses a wish to expand her repertoire in the area. Both fiction-writing and the process of language-learning require a certain aptitude for stepping outside of oneself in order to successfully take on another persona. An entirely new set of rules must be learned.

Before Niamh and I bid Jane Kelly slan, we linger outside Costa for several minutes while she informs us of a reunion that she will attend later that evening alongside other past students and academic staff of the creative writing M. Phil. course. We part ways as she turns left in the direction of Grafton Street, strolling apace with the college railings; her time spent on the other side of them occupying a meaningful segment of her past that still holds influence in her present; meanwhile, we rush back to a lecture in ours.

Interviewed by Nora Doorley

Saturnalian by Will Fleming

Your skin—

Did we play chess on a beach once?

Your mind is a palace:

Was it you who bore holes into my neck?

That clamp on my oesophagus—

Some say,

did you put it there?

when the last ravens leave, The septum melts away;

Your eyes—they’re the festival you know:

The nostril becomes the canal for Anne Boleyn’s swan-song.

The centre of an old-time show.

The curtains lift,

Your body—it’s a birthday party:

they fold in contours For orbs that illuminate

Blow out the candles, quick; Swallow the ether while you can— when smoke flows in curlicues from your ears, They’ll scrap you for parts.

Your brain licks lemons and limes;

scores that dance in fields: They tip their fuzzy hats to you; They drink you in in buckets, full with mirthful white:

Those are orbs that were your eyes.

No—don’t let on that you’re ill; Instead, return, a phoenix; Some schizophrenic sunflower, reborn from the waist up; Janus, with a crick in his neck.

Your sexuality reeks of Noel Coward leads:

Prone to flights of jazz; phials filled to the brim with stimulus— Your bipolar disorder belongs to your hands;

The annual Mountains to Sea dlr Book Festival will take place from March 9th– 13th 2016 with events for readers of all ages and interests. Featuring the likes of Paul Muldoon, Louise O’Neill, Donal Ryan and Kevin Barry.

For more information and tickets see www.mountainstosea.ie

Round your wrists wind the ‘meanwhiles;’ the wires slicing up time.

Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars will show in the Abbey Theatre from the 9th of March to the 23rd of April.

Tickets from €13 – €45

Competition Time!

Do you recognise this caged bird?

If you know her name, email us at TheQuill@tcd.ie Closing date: 25th March Good luck!

Congratulations to l ast month’s winner:

Anne Moroux

This year’s Inter-Varsity Poetry Slam takes place on March 9th from 18:00 to 20:45 in NCAD. Ad mission is free and it is a BYOB event.

Leo Connell and Ruth Atkins will be representing TCD at the event. The Quill wishes them the best of luck!

TCD and Me : Adam Hanna’s Reflections on Trinity

Adam Hanna is a visiting lecturer to the School of English, Trinity College Dublin and IRC Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow, School of English, University College Cork. He is currently teaching the senior freshman module Northern Irish Writing and the Troubles.

The English department of Trinity College Dublin has been a part of me for far longer than I have been a part of it.

My parents were both here in the 1960s, in a Dublin that I once read described as a city of turf smoke, rain and pop songs played on Dansette record players in frowsy bedsits. I grew up hearing stories from this time: of mornings when Brendan Behan was seen slouching, the worse for wear, down Grafton Street; of expiring vehicles being taken on excursions to the Wicklow Mountains; of self-published poetry books being sold in Front Square. When I read a poem that Michael Longley wrote about Trinity in the 1960s, its descriptions of popping gas rings, changeable ‘wives’ (a Trinity term for roommates that I’m not sure exists any more) and buttery books surprised me by making me nostalgic for a time I had never known. While I was growing up I heard, too, about brilliant lectures on literature that were given in those days by Brendan Kennelly, Terence Brown and David Norris. The tangible, endlessly fascinating, reminders of this world were the books – often with pencilled notes in the margins – that my parents had read at Trinity, that were scattered about the house and stored in boxes in the attic.

In a corner of the same attic where my parents stored their books, there was a box of books from a still more distant Trinity College. This was an ink-stamped, tinder-dry Edwardian tea-crate, and in it were the faintly foxed books of a great-grand-uncle who had been a lecturer in the physics department a hundred years ago, and whose life was cut short in the First World War. Today he is listed among the dead in the postgraduate reading room. In his box were editions of the works of Tennyson, Shakespeare, Shelley and others. Just like my parents’ books, the margins of his were crammed with pencil-notes: his job as a scientist did not stop him from reading poetry and, evidently, from taking it seriously.

The impressions I gained of Trinity both half-a-century and a century ago are of somewhere curious, vital, and perhaps faintly rackety; of a place where literature is both a part of everyday life and is granted the highest value.

Over a hundred years after my great-grand-uncle lectured at Trinity for the last time, I am very happy to be teaching here this semester. On the occasions when I have lobbed questions into a packed lecture theatre, I have been impressed by the responses that have been lobbed back at me again. They have often shown wide-ranging knowledge, healthy irreverence and a deep sense of the importance of literature. I am delighted to see how the spirit of long-ago Trinity College Dublin that I absorbed while I was growing up lives on today.