1916 - 2016 An Anthology of Reactions

“We all want to surpass the mark left by the previous generation,” said Lucia Lijtmaer, a young Argentine writer in an interview published in El Pais, the year in which Argentina celebrated the bicentenary of its independence.

Lijtmaer observed in the same interview that “nostalgia is the engine of history.” In the year in which here in Ireland we commemorate the centenary of the Easter Rising, a yearning, a desire for something lost, was a tangible undercurrent, an undertow, noticeable in the year’s events.

An inherited nostalgia is a feature of adolescence, Lucia Lijtmaer reminded us, which as a country we might equate with a kind of innocence, a kind of hope, which we have not entirely lost, for we are still a young nation.

Photographs and paintings of the signatories of the 1916 proclamation were in evidence everywhere throughout this summer of 2016, images of the yearning, restless, renewing young men, those signatories of the Proclamation. As another South American writer, César Vallejo, would have put it, they felt life right in the meridian, their dynamism captivating and absorbing us. They took possession of our spirit and ended up altering our course. Vallejo spoke of the flower of a prolific rebellion.

Ideas about the potency and fruitfulness of our rebellion and questions as to whether we have surpassed the mark left by a previous generation were frequent questions during the year. The question is raised in many ways – sometimes wistfully, in a hankering way, sometimes in an idealistic way, and sometimes the question is asked in anger.

In that extraordinary reverberation of 1916, a previous generation altered our course. How have we followed through on that transcendent week?

John Liddy, co-editor of this anthology, has an acute awareness of these things. In a poem published in the Irish Times during the summer, he said that “between comings and goings”, this much he has discerned, that one must “brace oneself or to be spurned.”

1916-2016: an anthology of reactions, edited by  John Liddy and Dominic Taylor, is available here:
https://www.quaybooksstore.com/products/1916-2016-an-anthology-of-reactions-editors-john-liddy-and-dominic-taylor