connect 2019 • 103 I very much enjoyed spending October 2018 as The Ireland Fund Monaco academic-in-residence, and the opportunity it afforded to study at the Princess Grace Irish Library (PGIL) in Monaco. I am especially grateful to Judith Gantley and Géraldine Lance for the warm welcome they gave me--and much kind care to me and my family members. The self-catering apartment provided by The Ireland Funds Monaco was very pleasant. Situated 20 minutes from the PGIL by direct bus, my daily commute through Monte-Carlo and around Hercules Harbour was most enjoyable. It was a pleasure to meet international supporters of The Ireland Funds at various social events during their 2018 Monaco Weekend Celebrations. I was very struck by the Irish-American visitors and by the wonderful dinner in which we participated—it reminded me of a good country wedding. I also enjoyed the response to my lecture on my recent book After Ireland, given to Friends of PGIL—the questions were sharp yet fully empathetic and I learned a lot from all our exchanges. Later in the month, I took part in the PGIL’s biennial two-day symposium sponsored by my own University of Notre Dame. The subject was “Eighteenth-Century Ireland” and my paper on Gulliver's Travels as a precursor of modern children's literature was titled "Honey, he Shrunk the Kids". My main work, however, through the month was to develop my long-standing research on the prose and plays of Samuel Beckett. For this I found the resources of the PGIL immensely helpful, not only on Beckett but also on Yeats, Joyce and other writers whose work influ- enced Beckett. I am committed to a book for Harvard University Press, which argued that Beckett was a mystic without God. He wrote from a position of unknowing, seeking a needlepoint in the self which might also have an equivalent point in some sort of deity out there in the universe. My title is Beckett Unknown: Mysticism Without God—and I contend that many great mystics, who have had a ravishing vision of a divine experience, often feel themselves to be without God. My con- clusion is that Beckett gets mad with God, whilst saying he isn't there, or insufficiently interventionist. He feels a very Irish grudge against God which the merely godless could never feel. He wills some kind of god into fragile being by the power of his anger with him—and then in the second half of the Unnamable allows that God (who is neither perfect nor happy) to speak. How a perfect God could create a flawed universe through which to realise a divine plan is a paradox not unlike that which faces the Beckett writer, who knows he'll leave just a stain on the silence but feels impelled to do so. I thank everyone in Monaco and The Ireland Funds for the chance to work on this. Declan Kiberd is a faculty member at English Department and Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies as the Donald and Marilyn Keough Professor of Irish Studies and Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. A leading international authority on the literature of Ireland, both in English and Irish, Kiberd has authored scores of articles and many books, including Synge and the Irish Language, Men and Feminism in Irish Literature, Irish Classics, The Irish Writer and the World, Inventing Ireland, and, most recently, Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Life in Joyce’s Masterpiece (2009). He has recently co-edited with PJ Mathews Handbook of the Irish Revival 1891-1922, a five-hundred-page anthology of cultural and political writings with commentaries and introductions, published by Abbey Theatre Press in June 2015. MONACO AROUND THE WORLD Photos: Ed Wright Images Declan Kiberd