Literary classics like Dracula, Ulysses and Gulliver’s Travels were born in this Irish capital. We walked down roads which Oscar Wilde, James Joyce and George Bernard Shaw called home
Think before you take that walk on the streets of Dublin. Perhaps a pint of the dark Guinness or an extra ladle of whisky in the Irish coffee might come handy. For you never know who is waiting at the bend. Bram Stoker with Count Dracula, Oscar Wilde with a satirical smile, William Butler Yeats laying dreams on the feet of his Muse Maud Gonne or Leopold Bloom whose one day in Dublin was chronicled by James Joyce in an unpunctuated Ulysses. Don’t get frazzled if Oliver Goldsmith talks to you in alliterations or Jonathan Swift walks out of St Patrick’s Cathedral in an embroidered cowl. Say your prayers, rather learn your pentameters, before you take that walk in Dublin, for there are not many cities with their sky so laden with literature.
It all began when Irish saints preached and scholars transcribed the Bible and Ireland became the hub of all things saintly and literary. And then there walked along a man who would skew the very idea of humanity with a gigantic Gulliver, a bunch of Lilliputians in a novel called Gulliver’s Travels. As the dean of St Patrick’s, Jonathan Swift would often kneel by the pew but he had to trudge miles to Belfast for inspiration. No, the storyline did not resonate from heaven, instead the idea of a giant popped from a brawny basaltic outcrop of the Cave Hill that overlooks the city of Belfast. Walk by in a hurry and it might look like an ordinary mountain, but squint your eye, focus and you would actually see the giant’s Napoleonic nose and colossal eyes staring back with eyebrows knitted in disdain.   

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