Melancholia in Mullingar but love still abounds

Staring At Lakes Memoir of Love, Melancholy and Magical Thinking

And it doesn’t, for Harding is writing about a visit to a monastery in India as if it were a dream of beauty, happiness, and fulfilment. It was no dream, but he wakes up in Leitrim, carrying us along with him on the road to adjustment, for which, in Harding’s case and most of the time, means disillusionment almost to the point of panic. Allowing for the writer’s marital and parental dislocation in the lake-pierced Irish midlands, this book might be sub-titled ‘Melancholic in Mullingar’.

Like the newspaper columns on which the chapters are based, the reflections cover a substantial period of Harding’s life. He is a novelist and playwright with a compelling backlist of priesthood, Buddhism (it was in a Buddhist monastery that everything got wonderful), marriage, fatherhood, and fiction. This history he compresses into “a vagrant priest and a failed writer” in a neat reversal of adjectives. His choices of language move his experiences beyond the boundaries of self, even where that self is wrapped in the folds of depression, a nomadic condition which settles its tent at Harding’s heart, occasionally for months at a time. There is always amelioration, however: Breakfast to introduce a new bed-ridden day consists of porridge with honey, an omelette, toast, and tea: “I eat gently, hoping nothing damages my stomach.”