When being young was very heaven

On a summer morning in 1968 the pupils of Anamar Primary School, which I attended, gathered to meet a C.I.E. bus at the border and headed off to Dublin, to the zoo; to the ice-cream factory and to visit a former class friend in a school in Drumcondra. The school was for the partially-sighted. When we arrived I saw, for the first time, young men with the pigment deficiency called Albinism. These young Albino men were gathered in huddles, listening intently to transistor radios which had their antennae extended. I had never seen a person with the pigment deficiency before. I was puzzled by these different looking people with white hair and pink eyes and even more puzzled by their intent listening to the new-fangled transistor radios for what was obviously breaking news.

It was an age when the technology available to us was scarce and cumbersome. Radios were hardly portable and listeners generally went to the family or communal radio and sat around it rather than carry around their own personal set. If anyone at the time had told me that these young people were an invading tribe from another planet, listening in to messages from their extra-terrestrial leader, I would have believed them. I later learnt that the news that was so preoccupying these teenagers was the assassination and death of Senator Robert, ‘Bobby’ Kennedy while he was on the election campaign trail. It was June 6th 1968.

Many people of a certain generation remember exactly where they were or what they were doing when President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was murdered in 1963. I was too young to remember or to register any memory then but I remember the assassination of his brother Robert. The fortieth anniversary of Robert Kennedy’s death; the illness of his brother Senator Edward Kennedy and the breakthrough of Senator Barack Obama as Democratic Nominee in the upcoming American elections have reminded many people of that period, a generation ago, when enthusiasm and hope was so high. The poet William Wordsworth is often quoted in his description of a period when idealism was similarly high. He was an early admirer of the reforms of the French Revolution, though he later repudiated his support for it. Two centuries ago, he wrote a poem on the Revolution that contains two lines which are particularly remembered. The larger extract reads:

‘Oh! Pleasant exercise of hope and joy!/ For mighty were the auxiliars which then stood/ Upon our side, we who were strong in love!/ Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,/ But to be young was very heaven!--Oh! Times,/ In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways/ Of custom, law, and statute, took at once/ The attraction of a country in romance!’

Senator Obama’s rival in the election will be the older Senator John McCain. The parallel with Wordsworth’s ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity,’ which is how he described poetry, is further heightened in the following imagery from the same poem:

‘The budding rose above the rose full blown. / What temper at the prospect did not wake/ To happiness unthought of? The inert/ were roused, and lively natures rapt away!’

The early decades of recent centuries have been times of idealism and optimism. Each succeeding century offers a blank sheet on which humankind must write another chapter of our ‘his-story’ as we call it. In Northern Ireland we appear to have effected our own revolution in community relations. A certain realism has replaced the heady idealism of the 1960s and we are still living with the fall-out from the excesses that almost always follow periods of revolution and rapid change. It has been said that an elderly Chinese politician was once asked what he thought was the legacy of the French Revolution of the late eighteenth century. He replied that he could not adequately comment on it because, as he explained, ‘it is much too early to say’.

Wordsworth counselled us not to build castles in the sky; not to be overly optimistic. He wisely noted that our dreams and visions need to be rooted in the messy reality that is human nature and the natural world. Age brought perspective and the idealism of youth gave way to the mellowness of his more mature years. All idealists are, he wrote, ‘called upon to exercise their skill,/ Not in Utopia, subterranean fields,/ or some secreted island, Heaven knows where!/ But in the very world, which is the world/ of all of us - the place where in the end/ we find our happiness, or not at all!’