This time-lapse video captures some of the magic of this wonderful city.

Like pilgrims more than 5,000 years ago, my first view of Newgrange came between the trees, atop its hill across the River Boyne. Of course, I was standing in the quite modern Brú na Bóinne Visitors Centre, but the effect was still awe-inspiring.

I waited for my assigned time slot (tours of Newgrange are only available through the Visitors Centre) and walked across the river to the shuttle bus stop, pausing on the bridge to look downriver, the Boyne meandering toward the Irish Sea. It began to rain.

The edifice dominates the hill Newgrange stands on, overlooking the Boyne valley with dozens of smaller unexcavated tombs dotting farmers’ fields below. (The reconstructed exterior is somewhat controversial — did Neolithic builders have the technology to create that white vertical wall? — though what’s visible today uses all original materials.) The front of the mound is faced by a circle of standing stones that cast shadows on the entrance at key times of the year.

One of the most impressive — and photographed — external features of Newgrange is the entrance stone, carved with abstract designs such as swirls and lozenges. In the Neolithic, the stone forced ancient visitors to climb over to cross the threshold into the sacred space within. Modern visitors are afforded wooden stairs (replete with metal handrails for “health and safety”).

Photography isn’t allowed inside. This sketch from 1903 gives a sense of the passage’s general dimensions, with the main chamber at the end.

As I stepped inside, the passage floor twisted upward toward the chamber. After squeezing past stones crushed out of alignment in their walls by the pressure from 5,000 years of the mound’s weight above, I stood in the chamber. Looking up, lines of corbelled stones stepped steeply upward toward the the vaulted ceiling in the darkness.

Each Winter Solstice, the rising sun shines through an opening above the entrance and illuminates the chamber. A rainy mid-afternoon in mid-June doesn’t have quite the same light, but thanks to a little modern technology (and just a hint of blarney from our guide), I stood in the interior of a 5,000-year-old passage tomb and saw light creep across the floor and touch the rear of the chamber as it did so long ago.

It was easy to imagine how celebrants must have felt in 3,200 BCE — that connection between something we humans have made and the nature with which we’re all still a part. But there’s also a deep sense of disconnection with that past, emphasized by one little piece of information I learned as the guide talked there in the dark with a halogen light shining up the tunnel.

The sun doesn’t shine exactly on the back of the chamber. It would be easy to dismiss this little fact as a lack of precision on the part of the Neolithic engineers or astronomers who designed Newgrange. In reality, the earth itself has shifted enough on its axis over the past 5,200 years that the passage and chamber are no longer aligned with the sun. The structure is so ancient that changes in the order of the universe itself have misaligned Newgrange from the Winter Solstice sun.

We have no idea what the carvings in and around Newgrange mean. We have no idea if it was even built as a tomb, or (quite probably) some type of solar observatory connected to religious faith. Despite all we’ve learned of their material culture and environment, the builders of Newgrange remain effectively a mystery. Nothing emphasizes this more than the failure of light from our sun to illuminate the modern darkness inside Newgrange the way it did in the Neolithic.

Axial precession will bring Newgrange back into alignment with the Winter Solstice in another 21,000 years. Will Newgrange still be standing? Will we still be around to find out?

One of my dearest memories of the summer in 1994 that I spent working on an archaeological dig in Jordan was a weekend trip to Petra. We arrived from Amman late in the evening, but several of my fellow archaeology students couldn’t wait until morning to see the amazing structures carved from the sandstone 2000 years ago, so we snuck across wadi after wadi, avoiding the main paths. Once past the guard posts, we walked through the narrow gorge known as al-Siq — pitch black at night — until the passage opened in front of us to reveal Al Kazhneh, lit only by starlight.

ArzLan built his LEGO version of the Treasury for the Hong Kong Animation Festival, and features Indiana Jones in his Last Crusade visit to this UNESCO Heritage site.

A full day at work followed by dinner with business partners from New Zealand precluded any participation in Bloomsday — a genuine disappointment, so perhaps I can embrace Philip Larkin’s source of inspiration.

Nevertheless, I’ve found myself following Joyce and Bloom all week long, and indeed earlier during my two previous visits in August 2008 and February this year.

My flight arrived early enough that my hotel room wasn’t ready, so I headed north on Grafton Street (“gay with housed awnings”), across the O’Connell Bridge, briefly into the General Post Office, then onto the James Joyce Centre. The museum preserves the front door of Number 7 Eccles Street, where Joyce’s friend J.F. Byrne lived in 1904 and which Joyce used as the home of Leopold and Molly Bloom in the novel.

Jetlag began to catch up with me as I finished the exhibits, so I took the offer of a free lecture at the Joyce Centre to hear a great deal about Phoenix Park that I’d never have learned otherwise. It’s now on my list of places to visit next time I’m in Dublin.

South on O’Connell Street, past Trinity College and the old Irish Houses of Parliament (already the Bank of Ireland in 1904), and back toward the hotel on aching feet…

The next afternoon, I headed north on Grafton Street again, but turned right onto Duke Street, where Davy Byrnes Pub exists in all its nonfictional glory.

He entered Davy Byrne’s. Moral pub. He doesn’t chat. Stands a drink now and then. But in leapyear once in four. Cashed a cheque for me once.

There were far more mouthwatering options on the contemporary menu, but I set aside my disdain for tourist behavior and ordered the gorgonzola sandwich.

Mr Bloom ate his strips of sandwich, fresh clean bread, with relish of disgust, pungent mustard, the feety savour of green cheese.

As much as I missed doing something symbolically Joycean on Bloomsday itself, I realized that Ulysses is everywhere, all the time in modern Dublin, and the real Dublin suffuses Ulysses on every page. An evening in a Dublin restaurant with Antipodean colleagues may have been no less “Joycean” than turning the rusty knob of Leopold Bloom’s front door or eating bread topped with overwhelmingly green cheese.

You can see a more complete photo tour of Joyce and Bloom’s Dublin by Tony Thwaites of the University of Queensland, to whom I’m indebted for some of my own after-the-fact details and choice Ulysses quotes.

I’m not sure how much time I’ll be able to spend outside work, but Bloomsday is a weeklong event (centered on June 16th, of course), so I’m looking forward to fitting in as much Joycean goodness as I can.

(Space.com has the full speech.)

Side note: $30 million for nuclear rockets? Interesting to see which aspects of Kennedy’s vision panned out — like the moon landing — and which didn’t.

So far, the only museum in Seattle that hasn’t disappointed on some level is the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, on the University of Washington campus. The Burke isn’t perfect, but there’s a lot to learn among its exhibits.

We arrived shortly after the museum opened at 10:00 and parked for free ($9.50 Mon-Sat) behind the museum. Even the Burke’s first impression is more “museum-like” than MOHAI or SAM, with large fossils lining the walkway and replicas of Northwest Coast totem poles (19th-century originals long-since decayed or rightfully returned to their tribal owners) standing amid the nearby trees. My wife was enchanted by the well-tended landscaping, and it was all I could do to drag her indoors.

In the museum foyer, a long glass case contains the museum’s most treasured artifacts and specimens. They were all lovely, but the only one that left a lasting impression was the skull of an orangutan donated by the Woodland Park Zoo, which sort of just made me sad thinking about the orang who must have died in the zoo and ended up here (don’t get me wrong; I do think zoos have an important role to play in conservation and education). We pressed on.

I was most interested in the museum’s collections of Washington State archaeological artifacts, and assumed that they would be displayed in the “cultural exhibits” that the man behind the front desk (with an impressive mustache) pointed us to downstairs.

The “Pacific Voices” exhibit appears to suggest that there is some sort of unifying culture that spans the Pacific Rim, from the Northwest Coast Indians to the distant Maori, Lao, Koreans, and other peoples who share access to this ocean. Some ethnologists have begun making tentative connections between Native American tribes here in the Pacific Northwest and the Ainu of Hokkaido, but an overarching Pacific culture seems as anthropologically unsound as a single Asian culture.

Taken individually, most of the exhibits in “Pacific Voices” were fascinating — a combination of intriguing artifacts from all over the Pacific and excellent contemporary art with a few models thrown in for interpretive purposes, but several of the sections lacked any meaningful artifacts (the Korean mannequins having a wedding and the abandoned Chinese New Year meal), and it was hard to buy the unifying theme beyond a common body of water. Perhaps I missed a placard clarifying the nuance the curators intended.

As it turns out, what I was really looking for in the museum was all upstairs, in the “Life and Times of Washington State” exhibit. Starting in the Cambrian and Ordovician with trilobites and crinoids, the exhibit walks visitors through the natural and early human history of Washington State, ending with the paleontology and archaeology of the state when it was first populated by the Clovis people.

Along the way, there’s a digression for dinosaurs — required to attract the critical museum demographic of 9-year-olds — even though Washington was mostly underwater at the time. In addition to the usual casts one might expect at a small museum, the Burke has an excellent mesosaurus plate from Brazil (Mesosaurus tenuidens) and complete, articulated mosasaur (Platecarpus tympaniticus).

Perhaps most exciting is an as-yet-unpublished holotype fossil of a new genus of early baleen whale. Other notable fossils include gorgeous crabs from the Lincoln Creek Formation in Grays Harbor County and “stone rose” from Republic.

But it’s ultimately the material culture of my fellow humans that I look for in natural history museums — along with the flora and fauna in their environments — and I wasn’t disappointed. Rounding a corner, a complete mastodon skeleton looms over a low ramp. On the left, Ice Age fossils from mammoth tusks to bison horns. An unexpected find at the Burke: The skeleton of a giant ground sloth excavated while building Sea-Tac Airport in 1961. On the right, a display case contains the East Wenatchee Clovis Cache.

Photo source: umt.edu

Between sentences as I type this, I’m feeling the weight of my newly rediscovered paleolithic blades in my left hand. On the opposite arm of the chair, I’ve lined up my neolithic blades. The contrast between the people who made the crude paleolithic blades and the near-modern (on evolutionary time scales) first people of the Americas couldn’t be more clear. (Update: See why my assessment of paleolithic tools as “crude” may be wrong: “Industrial design of the paleolithic“.) And there’s a clear connection between the smooth, clean lines of my neolithic blades from ‘Ain Ghazhal and these stunning Clovis blades from Wenatchee, Washington. Both the blades and their very presence in America represent the inevitable progress we make as a species. This brings us full circle to the “Pacific Voices” exhibit I criticized earlier.

Even if human culture of the last thousand years can’t be summarized so simplistically with an idea like “Pacific Rim culture,” there is deep truth to the idea that we really are all one people, with shared history and a shared future. The neolithic blades in my right hand and the Clovis blades at the Burke are proof of our shared history. The diversity on display in the “Pacific Voices” exhibit reflects how far we’ve come as a species since then, but it also reflects the deep divisions between us — especially as illustrated by the religious practices Burke curators have chosen to focus on.

As we look to our future, perhaps there are more lessons about our similarities to be learned from the people of Clovis and ‘Ain Ghazal than from “Pacific Voices.”

I was drawn inexorably to that deeper past, far beyond the 6,000-year timeline to which so many believers back home limited their thinking. There in the field, even theology professors set aside their biblical literalism to work and talk within the context of the facts evident all around us.

Neolithic blade from ‘Ain Ghazal, a “mere” 8,500-9,250 years old

Drawn by stories of undiscovered sites nearby, I walked in the cool evenings through the fallow fields surrounding the school for Palestinian girls where the project was headquartered. I found myself stepping across the surface of a world much, much older than Moses, Abraham, Noah, or Adam and Eve. Chipped stones lay scattered across furrows of barley stubble ploughed under at the end of the last season, and I filled my pockets with chunks of tan stone streaked with oranges and browns.

I’d corner one of the archaeologists and seek an impromptu lithic analysis. Laid out on a table or the side of an unmade bunk bed, I’d wait with baited breath for each pronouncement of “paleolithic scraper” or “mesolithic spearpoint,” disappointed with the overwhelmingly common “Sorry, that’s most likely just a rock.”

Surface archaeology — walking surveys of the landscape — tells us what lies beneath, where to dig someday when there’s time and money, but often little more. Recovered from the churned soil of a modern field in a part of the world where human history goes back far older than 50,000 years ago, it’s shocking to learn that there’s little value in these little hunks of rock — an easy approval for me to take them home by the nice man from the Department of Antiquities.

And so, these tools knapped from chert by people thirty, forty, fifty thousand years ago became some of my most treasured possessions. I could hold in my hand something made when ice sheets still covered much of Europe and humans still hadn’t entered the Americas — a time even before artists put aurochs, woolly mammoth, and herds of prancing horses on the walls of Lascaux and Chauvet. I felt a real connection with the men and women who lived all those years ago, a deeper connection than with any character from an ancient storybook.

In a cross-country move between Boston and Seattle, carefully packed to ensure no new chips flaked away, I lost track of my priceless artifacts. In a sense, it’s funny: Excavated by the larger blades of modern, mechanical ploughs, they emerged into the sunlight after tens of thousands of years only to be reburied in a box of miscellaneous office junk (a fate shared by many artifacts in museum vaults).

So I search for them all over again. Every so often, I’ll take down a box left packed for more than a decade and remove a few layers — books of 33-cent stamps, half-used note pads, and stacks of bills paid long ago. Someday, I’ll find them buried at the bottom of a box, pull them out, feel the smooth stone and hear them clink against each other. Someday, I’ll excavate these lost tools once again.

Father had church business with church elders next door, and he left me to play with the kindergarteners. At first, they stared at me, even though I wore the same clothes they all wore — blue shorts, white shirt, and round red hat.

The oldest boy called me a gaijin and then laughed.

“I was born in Tokyo,” I corrected him, “I’m a Child of Edo, you Son of the Soil.” Some of the girls laughed.

I played on the swing. The toes of all the other children had scooped the dry sand from under the seats, leaving furrows beneath my feet. At the top of each arc, I could see our blue Subaru over the concrete wall, parked in the church driveway. I played hopscotch with the girls who were nice earlier. I let them win.

A bell rang and we all went inside to sing “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.” When we sang “The Elephant Song,” I waved my arm from my face just like everyone else. The others were learning to count, but I already knew all ten of them so I was bored.

A lady in glasses and a green dress brought rice balls wrapped in seaweed and we each took one. I loved the saltiness of the black seaweed and the tang of the pickled plum in the center of the rice. The taste reminded me of staying over at Aunt Kiwako’s.

The teacher and the lady in green took mats from a closet and laid them on the floor. The others lay down quietly, some on their sides, some on their backs, some on their stomachs with an arm cradling their face. I told them I didn’t take naps but they didn’t care. They told me to lie down quietly and close my eyes.

I watched the red and green swirls behind my eyelids. I practiced counting to ten. I thought about the day before, when mother and I went to the park to meet father after work. I jumped over ditches and didn’t fall in. My favorite slide snaked down the hill, and I raced mother, me sliding in my corduroys, she running in her plaid skirt. I always won. Father came swinging his black briefcase.

When I woke up, we were on the highway home. I opened my eyes and pretended I hadn’t been sleeping. Some old ladies were planting shoots of rice in a field that we passed. They were probably singing.

Father said, “Did you sleep well? You must have had a lot of fun with all your new friends.”

“I wasn’t sleeping,” I said. “I don’t take naps. And they weren’t my friends.”

Rain began to streak the windows. Father flicked a knob and the windshield wipers started playing sumo. The one on the left always won. I turned to watch the power lines dip down, and then up, and then down again.

At Meiji Shrine, November 15, 1975