纽约不怀旧(英语学习50年精选.别样风土)

bsp;  Ireland is a seriously rich country now, not only the second most
expensive within the euro currency zone (after Finland) but also the one
most likely, economists say, to catch up with the United States in average
personal wealth? The cars that fill Dublin fill all the cities of Ireland, and
 swarm into every last cranny of the countryside, so that wherever you
drive, up the remotest mountain lane, down the narrowest track, there is
likely to be another car in the rearview mirror.3
     Ireland was a poor backwater, weighed down by its history.4 The
next year, as it seems, it had become a brilliantly successful young state,
a natural leader for all the small and minority nations of the world, and
the first in Europe--would you believe it--to ban smoking from all
workplaces, including pubs.
     Thousands upon thousands of new houses have transformed the look
of Ireland. Around every town they lie in regimented swaths, housing
the multitudes who have escaped the old rural way of life; speckled all
over the landscape are bungalows and villas of grander aspiration One
and all6 seem brand-new. Even ancient cottages are. spanking with fresh
whitewash, plastic window frames and burglar alarms,7 and no new house
in the world is half so white, neat and spotless as a new house in Ireland.
     It is a social as well as an economic revolution, but it does not
strike me as a triumph of the nouveaux riches. It is more like an
emancipation--more like Australia in the years when immigrants from
Continental Europe abruptly altered the mores of the country after World
War II.
     Tourism, of course, is mighty in Ireland (where isn't it?), but it hasn't
overwhelmed the place. Sites like the Ring of Kerry, which were beset by
jaunting cars in Victorian times, are congested with tour buses now; aging
folk musicians haunt the locations once beloved of watercolorists; but few
places in Ireland have become unbearably touristy.
     I suspect, all the same, that the Irish care more than they once did
about what the world thinks of them. Keeping Ireland Tidy has become such
a national preoccupation that when I drove into Aughrim, for years the
Tidiest Village in County Wicldow, I nearly mined and fled, so terrifyingly
tidy was it. When Tidiness is all around you, you have to skulk shamefaced
in the street outside the pub if you want to have a smoke with your pint.
      I am not complaining. Plenty of Irish people are, of course, mourning
lost traditions, worried about drugs and crime. Nevertheless, to an
outsider, what has happened to Ireland seems a 21st-century benediction.
It is a rare kind of epiphany: the moment when an entire nation, for so
long a victim of cruel circumstance, is seizing history for itself at last, and
starting all over again.