Perhaps, as scholars say, human history traces no simple straight line of progress, but this is probably one prediction as safe as any. Likely, too, is that, around the world, places like the Blasket will grow fewer. “Maybe it will come that all the little islands, all the little places where men do make a livelihood together out of the gathering of the strand and the hunt of the hill and the fish of the sea will be empty and forgotten.” These are the words Dylan Thomas gives Maurice O’Sullivan’s grandfather in a screenplay, never finished, based on Twenty Years A-Growing. And that surely is the pattern of the past century and more, countless versions of the Blasket abandonment being played out in Italy, India, Mexico, and Korea, one village after another vanishing altogether or stepping into the modern age. The Blaskets lost. London and Los Angeles, Dublin and New York won. Here and there, as with the Pennsylvania Dutch Amish or other religious communities, a few try, and may partially succeed, in squirming free of modernity’s grasp.
