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Notes -
So, what are you reading?
I'm still on Korzybski and Lovecraft. Also going through a few religious things.
The O'Rahilly. A biography of Michael Joseph O'Rahilly, one of the leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising in Ireland. He tried to stop it from happening and ironically ended up being the only rebel leader to be killed in action (as opposed to being executed). W.B Yeats wrote a poem about him. I had barely heard about him before and it's unclear whether this is whether he was relatively unimportant or because he ended up on the wrong side of history for opposing a rebellion which has since become glorified (though by now the revisionists have had their say).
The book was written by his son Aodogán O’Rahilly and he makes the latter case. I haven't gotten to the action yet but the family anecdotes and descriptions of life in the late 19th/early 20th centuries are interesting. It's a bit of a mystery as to why O'Rahilly became a radical Irish nationalist. Unlike most of the other Irish revolutionaries I have read about he had no family history of Irish nationalism, they had even removed the O' from their surnames, he had no experience in war and he wasn't a young man with nothing to lose either. He was part of the rising Catholic middle class, enjoying an income of £900 per year and he was married to an even wealthier American heiress. The most you see are hints here and there in his personal letters before he quickly becomes devoted to the cause.
I haven't gotten to the action yet but that should be interesting. The whole Irish Volunteer movement was subversions within subversions. On the one hand you had moderate parliamentary nationalists like John Redmond successfully convincing 90% of the Volunteers to go and fight in WW1 (Ireland had no draft) and achieve self-government by showing loyalty to the crown, on the other you had the secret oath-bound organisation of the Irish Republican Brotherhood doing their best to take control of the organisation and turn it into a force for insurrection. All that was for certain was that a 180,000 strong nationalist paramilitary organisation was being built to counter an equally large loyalist paramilitary organisation and O'Rahilly was helping to build it.
On the day that he drove across the country alone to join the battle he tried to stop, speaking to the people who had just wrested control of the Volunteers and relegated him to the sidelines of history, he is quoted as saying - "Well, I've helped to wind up the clock -- I might as well hear it strike!"
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