There's a joke, as old as time, about statue making. “It’s easy,” a master sculptor tells his confused students as he crafts a wildlife scene, “you just start with a lump of rock and chip away everything that doesn’t look like an elephant.” It’s a joke which works different ways. In some tellings, the butt of the joke is clearly the sculptor himself, too wrapped up in his own craft to understand how or why it works. (In that reading of the joke — and this might shock you — he’s often depicted as an Irishman.)
Other times, the joke is on everyone but the sculptor; the artless gawkers incapable of seeing the perfect image within the marble, whose dumb questions are batted away by someone to whom its hidden truths are so apparent as to be obvious. This week, I think a lot of Irish people have felt like that second group of people, as we’ve struggled to take in the UK’s reaction to losing its own great marble edifice, and received no greater explanation from our British cousins, than repeated assurances that it all makes perfect sense.
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