Today is Bloomsday, when the life of James Joyce is celebrated in Dublin and elsewhere, the day when Ulysses takes place. Which reminds me that I have yet to read the centennial edition copy Anna brought me from Shakespeare & Co in Paris last year. It's annotated, la!

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Yesterday I visited a friend's exhibition in the Museum of Literature, which is housed in an old Georgian building off St. Stephen’s Green. In a small dark room, pillows lie scattered across the floor and an armchair, a side table, and a lamp have been arranged in one corner, as if we have stumbled into someone's sitting room. Here I listen to a recording of my friend reading a short story while shadowy images of leopards and flowers and profiled faces are projected on a screen. Afterwards a blind woman tells her companion, "She has such a nice voice."

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In the bijou garden behind the museum cafe, rows of lucious pink roses, petals drifting, alternate with those of lavender, a heady scented haze in the brilliant sunshine. At the rear is a discreet gate leading into the Iveagh Gardens. What was Paradise but a garden walled from worldly concerns?

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The idea of a Museum of Literature is odd to me. How do you exhibit literature? In the Museum the biographical posters, book displays, and canopies of pages tell me nothing about literature, only about the lives lived around literature. Maybe, maybe, literature is a moment when a blind woman listens to a voice telling a story in a small dark room.

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