SCERT ENGLISH LITERATURE SYLLABUS UNIT-5: MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY PERIODS W.B.YEATS: SAILLING TO BYZANTIUM T.S.ELIOT: THE WASTE LAND W.H.AUDEN: THE UNKNOWN CITIZEN PHILIP LARKIN:CHURCH GOING C.B.LEWIS; FERN HILL T.S.ELIOT: TRADITION AND THE INDIVIDUAL TALENT E.M.FORSTER; 1. NOTES ON THE ENGLISH CHARACTER 2. MY WOOD 3. HYMN BEFORE ACTION 4. TOLERANCE 5. WHAT I BELIEVE G.B.SHAW: ARMS AND THE MAN JOHN OSBORN: LOOK BACK IN ANGER T.S.ELIOT: MURDER IN THE CATHEDRAL D.H.LAWRENCE: THE RAINBOW WILLIAM GOLDING: LORD OF THE FLIES JOSEPH CONRAD; LORD JIM

UNIT-5: MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY PERIODS W.B.YEATS: SAILLING TO BYZANTIUM AUTHOR: William Butler Yeats was born in County Dublin on June 13, 1865. Due to the demands of his career as an artist, Yeats's father moved the family to London when Yeats was still young, but he spent summers in County Sligo, in Western Ireland. When Yeats was fifteen, his family moved back to Dublin, where he attended the Metropolitan School of Art.Yeats's first work was published in the Dublin University Review in 1885. What is generally considered to be his first mature work, The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Works, came out in 1893. After The Wanderings of Oisin, which was based on an ancient Irish saga, Yeats never attempted another long poem and confined himself to the lyric form. Yeats grew interested in the occult at an early age. He visited a famous theosophist, Madame Blavatsky, and joined the Theosophical Society. Theosophy holds that all beliefs are a part of a larger spiritual system, and all hold some measure of the truth. Yeats attended many séances, beginning in 1886.Madame Blavatsky later asked Yeats to become a member of the inner circle of London‘s Theosophical Society as part of its Esoteric Section. However, Yeats was more interested in magical experiments and astrology, and was eventually expelled from the Theosophists. He later joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a cult that also included famous figures such as Aleister Crowley and Bram Stoker. His involvement in this cult may have led to his interest in theatre, as the cult often performed rituals using props. His mystical interests, many of which coalesced during his time in this cult, included a newfound belief in the magic of poetry and words themselves, which he believed can transport the reader to higher planes of understanding, much like a magic spell. In 1889, Yeats met the love of his life, an Irish revolutionary named Maude Gonne (1866-1953). Unfortunately, Maude did not return his ardor, and after refusing his marriage proposals three times, she married Major John MacBridge in 1903. Collections of poetry from this time include The Rose (1893) and The Wind Among the Reeds (1899).Yeats's early poetry drew on ancient Irish epics as well as the contemporary nationalist movement that was gaining force in Ireland. In the Ireland of 1880s and 1890s, the two were sometimes inseparable.

Many members of the Gaelic League, formed to prevent the disappearance of the Irish language and rehabilitate its classics, were also members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, a precursor organization to the Irish Republican Army (IRA).Yeats was fascinated by folktales, and, under the tutelage of George Russell and Thomas Hyde, he published Fairy and Folktales of the Irish Peasantry in 1888. In 1897, Yeats met Lady Gregory, another member of what was termed the Gaelic Revival, and she convinced him to start writing drama with Irish subject matter. Together with George Moore and Edward Martyn, the two set up The Abbey Theatre, Ireland's national theater, in Dublin in 1904. Yeats's Cathleen ni Houlihan, a nationalist play personifying Ireland as a woman, was performed on the opening night.In 1917, Yeats bought Thoor Ballylee, a Norman stone tower in County Sligo, near Coole Park. He spent the following summer with Maude Gonne's family, and proposed to her daughter, Iseult, but was turned down. The same year, he married Georgie Hyde-Lee. His wife shared his interest in the occult and claimed a gift of "automatic writing," in which her hand was directed by a divine force. Together, the two produced The Vision, a notebook of spiritual thoughts, in 1933. As well as writing poetry and plays and continuing to serve on the artistic board of the Abbey Theatre, Yeats became a member of the Seanad, the Irish senate, from 1922-25. He served on the committees that helped to create coinage for the new state. He left in disgust when the governmental organization was split in the aftermath of the Irish Civil War (1923-24).Yeats remained political as he grew older, though much of his status as the key poet of the Irish Revolution of the early 20th century is based on myth. Having described his political sensibilities as "a continual quarrel and a continual apology," Yeats did identify as an Irish nationalist, hoping for the unification of war-torn Ireland—but he also hated conflict, and he published his revolutionary poem, "Easter 1916," near the end of the Irish Revolution. 1919 found Yeats considering moving away to Japan or Italy to escape the guerrilla warfare that was tearing apart his country.As Yeats grew older, he developed a friendship with Ezra Pound, a poet who drew him away from his mystical, lyrical style into something drier and sparer. Arguably his most famous collection, The Tower (1928), contains political poems as well as a more modernist return to mythological topics in poems like "Leda and the Swan." Yeats became increasingly political in his old age, publishing a collection called Michael Robartes and the Dancer in 1921, which includes his famous "Easter, 1916" in which he describes the birth of modern Irish nationalism with the famous phrase, "a terrible beauty is born." The Winding Stair and Other

Poems (1933) contains poems that focus on Yeats's own estate at Coole Park—the winding stair being the stair at Thoor Ballylee. His later poems, especially "Under Ben Bulben," express his desire to be buried there. After his death, he was buried in Sligo, and he rests under the epitaph "Cast a cold eye on life, on death; horsemen, pass by!" WORK: The Tower, written by W.B. Yeats in 1928, contains some of the poet‘s bestknown works, including ―Leda and the Swan‖ and ―Sailing to Byzantium.‖ The Tower was written during a pivotal time in Yeats‘ artistic development. As a young writer, he had been attracted to Irish mythological themes, and his work was characterized by an almost flowery lyricism. Later in Yeats‘ life, he met Ezra Pound, who many contend influenced his style, making him more fragmented and modernist. The fragmentation of The Tower could be read in many other ways, as well. Elements of Yeats‘ later writing correspond to his allegiance to theosophy, with mystical elements appearing in poems like ―The Tower‖ and ―All Saints‘ Day.‖ Also, Yeats‘ very country was falling to pieces around him during the years when he wrote this collection. The chaos and uncertainty around him may have done as much to influence his style as his friendships or his allegiance to any new literary style. In form as well as subject matter, i[The Tower] marks a break from Yeats‘ previous style. Rather than writing of young Irish heroes, glory, and hope for the future, Yeats turns to the darker subject of age. He explores the contrast between his rising energies and creativity, and his deteriorating body. In ―A Man Young and Old,‖ most particularly, he confronts the existential crisis of aging, waiting to die, and watching one‘s friends die Summary The country that the speaker is in does not suit the old. It is full of bounty, with fish in the water and birds in the trees. The young and reproductive are caught in the earthly cycle of life and death. They do not heed ageless intelligence. An old man can be mere pathos. To escape this fate and to get away from his too-vital country, the aged speaker has sailed to Byzantium. Once arrived, he calls out to the elders who are part of God‘s retinue. He asks them to move in a gyre and take him away to death. He has a living heart fastened to a dead body, and as such cannot live.

Once the speaker has died, his body will no longer be organic, but fashioned of metal, like the statues that preserve dying emperor, or perhaps instead molded into a mechanical bird, which will sing to the lords and ladies of Byzantium. This is Yeats‘ most famous poem about aging--a theme that preoccupies him throughout The Tower. The poem traces the speaker‘s movement from youth to age, and the corresponding geographical move from Ireland, a country just being born as Yeats wrote, to Byzantium. Yeats felt that he no longer belonged in Ireland, as the young or the young in brutality, were caught up in what he calls ―sensual music.‖ This is the allure of murder in the name of republicanism, which disgusted Yeats. Byzantium was an ancient Greek city, which Yeats draws on for its decadent associations. The Byzantine Empire was centered on Constantinople, later renamed Istanbul. The speaker thinks that by escaping to Byzantium, he can escape the conflict between burning desire and a wasted body. Once there, he pleads to God‘s ―sages‖ to take away his life, meaning his body. This stanza is suggestive of Yeats‘ religious beliefs, as he wrote this collection after a turn to theosophy. The idea of elders waiting upon God is not familiar from any Western religion, but would be acceptable under theosophy, which holds that all spiritualities hold some measure of truth. Yeats imagines this process as being consumed by a healing fire that will allow his body to take on any form he wishes when it is finished. His first wish, to become a statue, seems too static. His second, to become a mechanical bird, alludes to the Byzantine Emperor Theophilus. Theophilus, according to legend, had just such mechanical birds. It is thus the poet‘s wish to be granted a body immune to death and to sing forever.

T.S.ELIOT: THE WASTE LAND AUTHOR: Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis in 1888 to a family with prominent New England heritage. Eliot largely abandoned his midwestern roots and chose to ally himself with both New and Old England throughout his life. He attended Harvard as an undergraduate in 1906, where he was accepted into its literary circles, and had a predilection for 16th- and 17th-century poetry, the Italian Renaissance (particularly Dante), Eastern religion, and philosophy. Perhaps the greatest influences on him, however, were 19th-century French Symbolists such as Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Stéphane Mallarmé, and especially Jules Laforgue. Eliot took from them a sensual yet precise attention to symbolic images, a feature that would be the hallmark of his brand of Modernism.Eliot also earned a master's degree from Harvard in 1910 before studying in Paris and Germany. He settled in England in 1914 at the outbreak of World War I, studying at Oxford, teaching, and working at a bank. In 1915 he married British writer Vivienne Haigh-Wood (they would divorce in 1933), a woman prone to poor physical and mental health; in November of 1921, Eliot had a nervous breakdown. By 1917 Eliot had already achieved great success with his first book of poems, Prufrock and Other Observations, which included "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," a work begun in his days at Harvard. Eliot's reputation was bolstered by the admiration and aid of esteemed contemporary poet Ezra Pound, the other towering figure of modernist poetry. During Eliot's recuperation from his breakdown in a Swiss sanitarium, he wrote The Waste Land, arguably the most influential English-language poem ever written. Eliot founded the quarterly journal Criterion in 1922, editing it until its end in 1939. He was now the voice of modernism, and in London he expanded the breadth of his writing. In addition to writing poetry and editing it for various publications, he wrote philosophical reviews and a number of critical essays. Many of these, such as "Tradition and the Individual Talent," have become classics, smartly and affectionately dissecting other poets while subtly informing the reader about Eliot's own work. Eliot declared his preference for poetry that does away with the poet's own personality and uses the "objective correlative" of symbolic, meaningful, and often chaotic concrete imagery.

Eliot joined the Church of England in 1927 and his subsequent work reflects his Anglican attitudes. The six-part poem "Ash Wednesday" (1930) and other religious works in the early part of the 1930s, while notable in their own right, retrospectively feel like a warm-up for his epic Four Quartets (completed and published together in 1943). Eliot used his wit, philosophical preoccupation with time, and vocal range to examine further religious issues. Eliot wrote his first play, Murder in the Cathedral, in 1935. A verse drama about the murder of Archbishop Thomas Becket, the play's religious themes were forerunners of Eliot's four other major plays, The Family Reunion (1939), The Cocktail Party (1949), The Confidential Clerk (1953), and The Elder Statesman (1959). With these religious verse dramas cloaked in secular conversational comedy, Eliot belied whatever pretensions his detractors may have found in his Anglophilia. He wrote Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats in 1939, a book of verse for children that was eventually adapted into the Broadway musical Cats. As one might predict based on the tone of his poetry, Eliot was unhappy for most of his life, but his second marriage in 1957 proved fruitful. When he died in 1965, he was the recipient of a Nobel Prize (1948), the author of the century's most influential poem, and arguably the century's most important poet. Perhaps due to the large shadow he casts, relatively few poets have tried to ape his style; others simply find him cold. Still, no one can escape the authority of Eliot's modernism; it is as relevant today as it was in 1922. While Eliot may not have as much influence on poets today as do some of his contemporaries, the magnitude of his impact on poetry is unrivaled. WORK: The Waste Land" caused a sensation when it was published in 1922. It is today the most widely translated and studied English-language poem of the twentieth century. This is perhaps surprising given the poem's length and its difficulty, but Eliot's vision of modern life as plagued by sordid impulses, widespread apathy, and pervasive soullessness packed a punch when readers first encountered it. Of course, "The Waste Land" is not quite the poem Eliot originally drafted. Eliot's close friend and colleague, Ezra Pound, significantly revised the poem, suggesting major cuts and compressions. Thanks to Pound's heavy editing, as well as suggestions (specifically about scenes relevant to their stormy, hostile marriage) from Haigh-Wood, "The Waste Land" defined Modernist poetry and became possibly the most influential poem of the century. Devoid of a single speaker's voice, the poem ceaselessly shifts its tone and form, instead grafting together

numerous allusive voices from Eliot's substantial poetic repertoire; Dante shares the stage with nonsense sounds (a technique that also showcases Eliot's dry wit). Believing this style best represented the fragmentation of the modern world, Eliot focused on the sterility of modern culture and its lack of tradition and ritual. Despite this pessimistic viewpoint, many find its mythical, religious ending hopeful about humanity's chance for renewal. Pound's influence on the final version of "The Waste Land" is significant. At the time of the poem's composition, Eliot was ill, struggling to recover from his nervous breakdown and languishing through an unhappy marriage. Pound offered him support and friendship; his belief in and admiration for Eliot were enormous. In turn, however, he radically trimmed Eliot's long first draft (nineteen pages, by some accounts), bringing the poem closer to its current version. This is not to say Eliot would not have revised the poem on his own in similar ways; rather, the two men seemed to have genuinely collaborated on molding what was already a loose and at times free-flowing work. Pound, like Eliot a crucible of modernism, called for compression, ellipsis, reduction. The poem grew yet more cryptic; references that were previously clear now became more obscure. Explanations were out the window. The result was a more difficult work -- but arguably a richer one. Eliot did not take all of Pound's notes, but he did follow his friend's advice enough to turn his sprawling work into a tight, elliptical, and fragmented piece. Once the poem was completed, Pound lobbied on its behalf, convincing others of its importance. He believed in Eliot's genius, and in the impact "The Waste Land" would have on the literature of its day. That impact ultimately stretched beyond poetry, to novels, painting, music, and all the other arts. John Dos Passos's Manhattan Transfer owes a significant debt to "The Waste Land," for example. Eliot's take on the modern world profoundly shaped future schools of thought and literature, and his 1922 poem remains a touchstone of the Englishlanguage canon. SUMMARY: The poem begins with a section entitled "The Burial of the Dead." In it, the narrator -- perhaps a representation of Eliot himself -- describes the seasons. Spring brings "memory and desire," and so the narrator's memory drifts back to times in Munich, to childhood sled rides, and to a possible romance with a "hyacinth girl."

The memories only go so far, however. The narrator is now surrounded by a desolate land full of "stony rubbish." He remembers a fortune-teller named Madame Sosostris who said he was "the drowned Phoenician Sailor" and that he should "fear death by water." Next he finds himself on London Bridge, surrounded by a crowd of people. He spots a friend of his from wartime, and calls out to him. The next section, "A Game of Chess," transports the reader abruptly from the streets of London to a gilded drawing room, in which sits a rich, jewelbedecked lady who complains about her nerves and wonders what to do. The poem drifts again, this time to a pub at closing time in which two Cockney women gossip. Within a few stanzas, we have moved from the upper crust of society to London's low-life. "The Fire Sermon" opens with an image of a river. The narrator sits on the banks and muses on the deplorable state of the world. As Tiresias, he sees a young "carbuncular" man hop into bed with a lonely female typist, only to aggressively make love to her and then leave without hesitation. The poem returns to the river, where maidens sing a song of lament, one of them crying over her loss of innocence to a similarly lustful man. "Death by Water," the fourth section of the poem, describes a dead Phoenician lying in the water -- perhaps the same drowned sailor of whom Madame Sosostris spoke. "What the Thunder Said" shifts locales from the sea to rocks and mountains. The narrator cries for rain, and it finally comes. The thunder that accompanies it ushers in the three-pronged dictum sprung from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad: "Datta, dayadhvam, damyata": to give, to sympathize, to control. With these commandments, benediction is possible, despite the collapse of civilization that is under way -- "London bridge is falling down falling down falling down."

W.H.AUDEN: THE UNKNOWN CITIZEN AUTHOR: Wystan Hugh Auden was born in York, England, on February 21, 1907. He moved to Birmingham during childhood and was educated at Christ Church, Oxford. As a young man he was influenced by the poetry of Thomas Hardy and Robert Frost, as well as William Blake, Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Old English verse. At Oxford his precocity as a poet was immediately apparent, and he formed lifelong friendships with two fellow writers, Stephen Spender and Christopher Isherwood. In 1928, his collection Poems was privately printed, but it wasn't until 1930, when another collection titled Poems (though its contents were different) was published, that Auden was established as the leading voice of a new generation.Ever since, he has been admired for his unsurpassed technical virtuosity and an ability to write poems in nearly every imaginable verse form; the incorporation in his work of popular culture, current events, and vernacular speech; and also for the vast range of his intellect, which drew easily from an extraordinary variety of literatures, art forms, social and political theories, and scientific and technical information. He had a remarkable wit, and often mimicked the writing styles of other poets such as Dickinson, W. B. Yeats, and Henry James. His poetry frequently recounts, literally or metaphorically, a journey or quest, and his travels provided rich material for his verse.He visited Germany, Iceland, and China, served in the Spanish Civil war, and in 1939 moved to the United States, where he met his lover, Chester Kallman, and became an American citizen. His own beliefs changed radically between his youthful career in England, when he was an ardent advocate of socialism and Freudian psychoanalysis, and his later phase in America, when his central preoccupation became Christianity and the theology of modern Protestant theologians. A prolific writer, Auden was also a noted playwright, librettist, editor, and essayist. Generally considered the greatest English poet of the twentieth century, his work has exerted a major influence on succeeding generations of poets on both sides of the Atlantic.W. H. Auden served as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1954 to 1973, and divided most of the second half of his life between residences in New York City and Austria. He died in Vienna on September 29, 1973.

WORK: "The Unknown Citizen" was written by the British poet W.H. Auden, not long after he moved to America in 1939. The poem is a kind of satirical elegy written in praise of a man who has recently died and who lived what the government has deemed an exemplary life. This life, really, seems to have been perfectly ho-hum—exemplary only insofar as this man never did anything to question or deviate from society's expectations. On the one hand, the poem implicitly critiques the standardization of modern life, suggesting that people risks losing sight of what it means to be an individual when they focus exclusively on the same status symbols and markers of achievement (like having the right job, the right number of kids, the right car, and so forth). The poem also builds a frightening picture of a world ruled by total conformity and state oppression, in which a bureaucratic government dictates and spies on its citizens' daily lives. SUMMARY: According to the Bureau of Statistics, nobody ever made a formal complaint about him. The other reports about his behavior all say that he was basically the perfect citizen, because he did everything he was supposed to do in order to serve his society. He worked the same job his entire life until he retired, apart from a break when he served in the War. His employer, Fudge Motors Inc., was fine with him. He had a totally normal outlook on life and politics, and he contributed to his Union (which, we've checked, was not a threat). Our Psychology institution also established that his friends liked hanging out with him. According to the Official Media, he bought a paper regularly and responded to adverts as was to be expected. He had the proper insurance, and our official health records show he only needed to stay in the hospital one time. The departments in charge of organizing society agree that he approved of the State's vision and that he had all the possessions that a modern individual needs—like a record player, radio, car, and fridge. Our Public Opinion department asserts that he always held the right view on the big issues: if it was a peaceful time, he approved, but he also went to war when we needed him to. He had a wife and five children, contributing the correct number of new human beings to society according to our governmental official who aims to optimize the gene pool. He let the children's teachers do their work without questioning their teachings. It's ridiculous to ask if he was free or happy, because we would have known if there was anything wrong with him.

―The Unknown Citizen‖ is a parody of an elegy (a poem to commemorate someone who has recently died). This elegy is delivered by "the State"—the government and its institutions—rather than by a loving friend or family member. Through this, the poem pokes fun at and implicitly critiques the modern world for granting too many far-reaching powers to the state, showing how the state oppresses those unlucky enough to live within its grasp. In particular, the poem looks at how this oppression is achieved through surveillance—through the state knowing everything about its inhabitants. The title is thus ironic, as there's little that the state doesn't seem to know about the dead man. Overall, the poem argues that freedom is impossible in a society that so closely watches its citizens, even under the guise of helping them live a supposedly good life. Though on the surface the poem is praising the life of the dead ―unknown citizen,‖ it only does so because this person lived a textbook example of an obedient, non-questioning life. In the poem‘s world, a good citizen is one who does everything they‘re is supposed to. Indeed, that‘s why the speaker—the creepy ―we‖ of the poem—begins by offering what is probably the highest compliment in this dystopia: ―there was no official complaint‖ against the dead man (according to the Bureau of Statistics). In other words, he never did anything wrong. If he had, the state would ―certainly have heard‖ about it—revealing the frightening reach of their view into people's lives. This points to one of the poem‘s main criticisms of the state: its overreaching surveillance. The state treats life as a kind of science, improvable only through increasingly detailed data sets—and denying life any sense of mystery, joy, or freedom in the process. There is one way to be, this implies, and the surveillance is there to help (or, more likely, force) the individual to be that way. Accordingly, the state encroaches on every aspect of the dead man‘s life. Indeed, the poem reads pretty much as a list of all the ways that a state can violate its citizens‘ freedoms. The state approves of the dead man‘s life because it knows so much about him: his working life, sociability, opinions on the news, his personal possessions, his attitude to his children‘s education, and so on. There is a kind of parable at work here, as the poem implies that a state with too much power will only use that power to sink its claws deeper and deeper into people‘s everyday lives.

And not only does this oppressive state spy on its citizens, it also co-opts their language. So while an alternative view of humanity might prioritize, say, happiness, a tight-knit community, and moral virtue over everything being done correctly and by the book, the state here has already got that covered. ―Community,‖ ―saint[lines],‖ and happiness have all been re-defined to fit what the state wants, not just taking away people‘s freedoms but eroding the ways in which they can even conceive of those freedoms. Overall, then, Auden‘s ―The Unknown Citizen‖ reads as a cautionary tale to modern society—asking people to question the relationship between the state and the individual, and to examine whether their government upholds the right values in terms of what it means to live a good life.

PHILIP LARKIN: CHURCH GOING AUTHOR: On August 9, 1922, Philip Larkin was born in Coventry, England. He attended St. John's College, Oxford. His first book of poetry, The North Ship, was published in 1945 and, though not particularly strong on its own, is notable insofar as certain passages foreshadow the unique sensibility and maturity that characterizes his later work. In 1946, Larkin discovered the poetry of Thomas Hardy and became a great admirer of his poetry, learning from Hardy how to make the commonplace and often dreary details of his life the basis for extremely tough, unsparing, and memorable poems. With his second volume of poetry, The Less Deceived (1955), Larkin became the preeminent poet of his generation, and a leading voice of what came to be called "The Movement," a group of young English writers who rejected the prevailing fashion for neo-Romantic writing in the style of Yeats and Dylan Thomas. Like Hardy, Larkin focused on intense personal emotion but strictly avoided sentimentality or self-pity. In 1964, he confirmed his reputation as a major poet with the publication of The Whitsun Weddings, and again in 1974 with High Windows: collections whose searing, often mocking, wit does not conceal the poet's dark vision and underlying obsession with universal themes of mortality, love, and human solitude. Deeply anti-social and a great lover and published critic of American jazz, Larkin never married and worked as a librarian in the provincial city of Hull, where he died on December 2, 1985. WORK: First published in The Less Deceived in 1955, "Church Going" remains one of Philip Larkin's best-known poems. Its speaker casually visits an empty church, a place he views with skeptical irreverence. Nevertheless, the speaker admits that he's drawn to churches and speculates about what will become of them once religion itself has completely died out. Though he sees no future for the beliefs that churches promote, the speaker suggests that people will always need some version of the atmosphere they provide: one of human togetherness and "serious" contemplation of life and death. The pun in the title hints at the poem's themes: the speaker believes that churches are going as in vanishing, but that some form of "churchgoing" will survive.

SUMMARY: As soon as I'm positive that there's nothing happening inside the building, I enter and let the door close loudly behind me. I'm visiting yet another church: one with floor mats, pews, and stone architecture; displays of cut flowers that were laid out for Sunday services and are starting to brown; some brass objects and the like up near the altar; the trim little pipe organ; and an uncomfortable, stale-smelling, distracting silence, which has been settled here for ages. Since I don't have a hat to take off, I remove my bicycle clips as an awkward way of showing respect. I move further inside and touch the rim of the special vessel for holy water. The church roof looks almost new from my vantage point, and I wonder if was recently cleaned or totally restored. I'm sure someone could answer that question, but I can't. Stepping up to the pulpit, I browse a few imposing, moralistic biblical verses and read out the words "Here endeth" with more volume than I'd anticipated. The sound of my voice echoing through the church briefly seems to mock me. Heading back out the front door, I sign the church's guestbook, drop a small Irish coin into the donation box, and think that it wasn't worth taking the time to go in. And yet, that's exactly what I did; in fact, I stop by churches all the time. Each time I do, I end up feeling this same kind of uncertainty, wondering what I should be trying to find—and wondering what society will do with churches once people completely stop attending them. I wonder whether we'll leave a few of the grander ones around as tourist attractions—with their holy documents, ceremonial plateware, and vessels for the Eucharist locked up in cases—and just let the others get taken over by sheep and the elements (i.e., let them decay). Will we steer clear of those churches, believing they bring bad luck? Or will shady women visit them after dark to make their kids touch a certain stone for luck, pick herbs that are supposed to heal cancer, or wait around on some specific night they've been told that a ghost will show up? The power of the churches will endure in some form, in games, riddles, or other random-seeming ways. But superstition, like religious belief, has to end at some point—and what will be left of churches when even the need for active disbelief has ended? Just the grass, pavement with weeds poking through, prickly vines, some bits of the old buildings, and the sky above. The decaying church's shape will be harder to recognize over time, its purpose harder to remember. I wonder who will be the absolute last person to seek this church out as a church. One of the history buffs who touch things curiously and jot notes and know what "rood-lofts" and other obscure parts of the church