Colum McCann

Thank you very much.

Echoes in the Garden, my old suggestion.

The Palestinian-born scholar Edward Said argued that music is a contrapuntal force, where multiple voices and lines operate independently but together, providing a way for us to understand the world in all its messiness and complexity.

Survival, he said, is about the connections between things, music, literature, friendship,

what T.S.

Eliot called the other echoes in the garden.

Ultimately, we get our voice from the voices of others.

It puts me in mind of the great Dublin phrase, Mielsegosia, which is close enough to Miel flower, which may well have come from the celosia flower, which you and I might know as a cockscomb, or, since it resembles that great force that we mysteriously carry around in our noggins, the brain flower.

Or indeed, the word might come from the Irish, shiditia.

There you are.

And, who knows, in any case, miol sagóise, it's contrapuntal.

I have always believed in the music of literature.

The sound of things creates the meaning of things.

In fact, I would always sacrifice a tad of meaning for the pleasure of a sound.

Underneath the sound, the true rhythm of revelation vibrates.

Even as a child, I was fascinated by the inscape, as it's called, of Jared Manley Hopkins' poems.

Like these lines from The Windhover.

I saw this morning, morning's minion, kingdom of daylight's dolphin, dappled dawn-drawn falcon.

And a decade ago, at the Electric Picnic Festival, this slightly dishevelled falcon was ushered into a tent to hear a sound really unlike any I'd ever heard before.

On stage, a man on his own, with a fiddle.