"The Dead"Diamonds

I first read Dubliners about six years ago, because I thought it was required reading for a class(it turned out that the syllabus had changed and that it was no longer required, much to my ire). I didn't enjoy anything in it or the experiance of reading it(I had, and still do, a dislike for reading short story collections. I tend to be happier reading novels or a story entirely on its own and not as part of a collection). Except for the last four pages of The Dead. I remember being very startled at how something previously so distant and cold for me had suddenly become so beautiful and real. And I bemoaned that the whole thing couldn't have been like the last few pages, with that great, terribly painful revelation about Michael Furey and how we are all to die, and fall as the snow does outside of the window.

Really, one of the diamonds that we were instructed to locate I think foreshadows this directly: At dinner, Freddy Malins talking to Mr Browne about Mount Melleray, where he will be going shortly, and the monks that live there, who sleep in their own coffins. Mr Browne doesn't understand this at all--why would they do a thing like that? "Freddy Malins explained to him, as best he could, that the monks were trying to make up for the sins committed by all the sinners in the outside world...--The coffin, said Mary Jane, is to remind them of their last end."(pg. 201) This was an "oh" moment in a way that it wasn't when I first read it.

Same for the moment when Gabriel looks back and sees his wife Gretta on the stairway, listening to the music, terribly moved. "She was leaning on the banisters, listening to something. Gabriel was surprised at her stillness and strained his ear to listen also. But he could hear little save the noise of laughter and dispute on the front steps, a few chords struck on a piano and a few notes of a man's voice singing." (pg. 209). Its a bit like The Wind in the Willows when Rat and Mole no longer remember and strain to hear the music, but cannot quite hear it. It's really terribly moving.