“We all want to surpass the mark left by the previous generation,” said Lucia Lijtmaer, a young Argentine writer in an interview published the summer of 1916 in El Pais, the year in which Argentina celebrated the bicentenary of its independence.
Lijtmaer observed in the same interview that “nostalgia is the engine of history.” In the year in which Ireland we commemorated the centenary of the Easter Rising, a yearning, a desire for something lost, was a tangible undercurrent, an undertow, noticeable in the year’s events.
An inherited nostalgia is a feature of adolescence, Lucia Lijtmaer reminded us, which as a country we might equate with a kind of innocence, a kind of hope, which we have not entirely lost, for we are still a young nation.
Photographs and paintings of the signatories of the 1916 proclamation were in evidence everywhere throughout the summer of 2016, images of the yearning, restless, renewing young men, those signatories of the Proclamation. As another South American writer, César Vallejo, would have put it, they felt life right in the meridian, their dynamism captivating and absorbing us. They took possession of our spirit and ended up altering our course. Vallejo spoke of the flower of a prolific rebellion.
Ideas about the potency and fruitfulness of our rebellion and questions as to whether we in Ireland have surpassed the mark left by a previous generation are to be found in some form in many of the contributions to this anthology. The question is raised in my ways – sometimes wistfully, in a hankering way, sometimes in an idealistic way, and sometimes the question is asked in anger.
In that extraordinary reverberation of 1916, a previous generation altered our course. This book raises the question: How have we followed through on that transcendent week?
