For Séamas O’Reilly a life lived in good socks is a life of comfort, beauty – and strange internet searches
Seamus Heaney was a schoolboy when he first encountered TS Eliot’s The Hollow Men, a poem he described as moving him like nothing he’d ever before experienced. “What happened as I read,” he wrote in the Boston Review of 3 October 1989, “was the equivalent of what happens in an otherwise warm and well-wrapped body once a cold wind gets at the ankles.” Reading his words, I was struck, as always, by Heaney’s economy of description, his tripwire acuity for rendering ineffable sensations plain and alive. Unlike him, however, I was clearly used to wearing much, much better socks.
The chill of an ankle wouldn’t, for me, have delivered a revelatory moment or a frisson of glee, but a personal failing, and one I would never allow to recur. I read his words at the self-same Derry school in which his encounter with Eliot’s classic took place, an institution in which I was a pupil 40 years later. Garbed in that same black, blue and grey uniform, I can report I felt no such pedal chill. Then, as now, I rejected the false choice between appreciating the wonder of language and the blissful comfort of thermally padded, Argyle-pattern sock ware.
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