This hidden treasure of Dublin cannot possibly be overrated.
Everyone's pictures (I have mine, too) cannot begin to show the feeling of walking in here on a Saturday morning, and being greeted by calm and graceful people from whom literacy and grace emanates like welcome heat from a radiator on the first chill morning of fall.
I discovered this place because the first of two night visit to Dublin at the tail end of a trip through Ireland coincided with Culture Night 2015 (Friday, September 18th). Apparently, Culture Night is when every single business or center of anything culture related opens past normal business hours all throughout Ireland. As I searched through a comprehensively coded map detailing the offerings, my eye happened to fall upon a dot for Swenys Pharmacy, mentioning celebratory Joyce readings, of course, availability of their famous lemon soap bars. As I am a soap bar fiend and respect Joyce, so I made sure to drop by.
There, on the corner of a relatively empty street corner right out of a stage set but so real, was a warmly lit building. Well dressed city folk were packed into the tall ceilinged space, which brimmed with books, bottles of yesteryear's elixirs in glass cases, and, at the end of a long corner, a small pile of hand cut, paper wrapped soaps for five Euros each. Noting this and picking up a copy of BORSTAL BOY by Brendan Behan (an Irish author I'd just discovered at the Dublin Writers Museum earlier that eve), I proceeded to pay up. Well, DUH, it was cash only, and the only ATM within the radius was broken and skirted by what seemed to be the only homeless folks around. I vowed to come back at opening time the next morning.
So there I was on a Saturday morning. Without all the crowding from the previous night, I could sense the utter peace of the place, and detect a scent simultaneously libraryesque and a churchlike, old and sacred. The bow tied, lab-coated character whom I'd seen the night before (named PJ) was not present, but instead, there were Joseph and Debbie and a few other sweatered individuals who provided me with some tea and milk and led me to sit behind the wraparound glossy wooden bench that was now visible behind a central pile of books on a long table.
Just moments after sitting and swapping tea coasters (I got mallard, he got cat) and exchanging pleasantries with my seat neighbor Joseph, Debbie stood behind the counter and began reading aloud from Ulysses, which I have not yet read! I thought, "Saweeeet, a live reading!" But then, the reading continued in a counterclockwise direction in a beautiful rainbow of brogues and other miscellaneous European lilts, and by the time Joseph was reading his page of text, I realized that - holy shit - I was a part of the reading, too. Breaking out in a cold sweat last felt during high school, I grabbed the first copy of Ulysses that I could find from the many piled up and around the table before us. I opened the book in time to have my eyes land on THE page and THE VERY WORD that Joseph was uttering at that moment.
Destiny.
As we continued, a couple people dropped in to read a page of their own, while others peeked in and scuttled away from the bookishness of what was going on. It wasn't until two quick hours later that the group spontaneously agreed that we should stop before "disappearing into oblivion." Turned out, this crew of five or so had been meeting here every Saturday, progressing through this whole fat book with its outrageous lexicon and hilarious detailing of Dublin life in the early 1900s.
I lingered on my way out, purchasing BORSTAL BOY, HONOUR THY FATHER by Eamonn McGrath, and the very magical copy of ULYSSES that I'd picked up during the reading. And three lemon soaps.
Consequently, I was late to my tour of the Guinness Storehouse, which made me almost miss the start of the annual Liffey Swim. I just just made it, plunging into 40-something degree water with two just-swallowed pints of frothy Guinness in my belly, coming in dead last in the race. But I wouldn't take back those hours of stillness at Swenys.
Being there provided what I didn't realize I'd been looking for in Dublin and all of Ireland - the culmination of so many of my preconceived notions and hopes for the city and the country that I'd developed as a little girl while growing up in Massachusetts in a town thick with Irish descendants and reading Dubliners in high school, fidgeting from the marvelously depressing content and the hardness of the old wooden chair I was sitting in.
Recently threatened with closure, this business now also a small institute for preservation, guarded by local stewards of everything awesome. They even have a relevant and expansive website to admire until you can get there physically.
http://sweny.ie/site/
If in Dublin, go. I am homesick for this place, and thus for the city. read more