{"id":27,"date":"2006-04-03T18:14:09","date_gmt":"2006-04-03T22:14:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=27"},"modified":"2006-04-03T18:14:09","modified_gmt":"2006-04-03T22:14:09","slug":"john-mcgahern","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=27","title":{"rendered":"John McGahern"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you have not already seen it, John Naughton has a very interesting account<\/a> of McGahern’s funeral on his blog. I happened to be reading his Memoirs<\/em> last week, and so learned of his mother’s death the day before I learned of his own. Here is one paragraph to demonstrate what we have lost; he was about eight when his mother died, and he went from his aunt Maggie’s to visit the grave:<\/p>\n\n

I slept in the spare bed in Pat’s room and woke to the shunting of the morning trains. The early part of the day I spent happily with Maggie. Then I cycled out alone to the grave. All that came to me as I stood at the grave was the dull light from the fresh clay. When I put my fingers down into the clay, as if into water, and brought them to my mouth, all they tasted of was clay. I then knelt and willed myself to pray in the empty church.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

“All that came to me as I stood by the grave was the dull light from the fresh clay”. Could any sentence be better?<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you have not already seen it, John Naughton has a very interesting account of McGahern’s funeral on his blog. I happened to be reading his Memoirs last week, and so learned of his mother’s death the day before I … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=27"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}