‘THE PUB IS THE GYMNASIUM OF THE MIND”
In today’s ceaselessly connected world, powered by algorithms, AI hallucinations and bottomless data sets, there is something reassuringly defiant about the hitherto unobserved and opaque life and work of Tiberius Flaherty. Said to have been born circa 1897 in the environs of Sneem, Co. Kerry, Tiberius was believed to have been the result of an illicit tryst between a local schoolmistress and an itinerant birdcage maker. An autodidact, despite little to no formal schooling, the young Tiberius taught himself the fundamentals of literature through discarded Penny Dreadfuls and would entertain himself by writing rambling and incoherent alternative endings to various Old Testament verses, much to the chagrin of the local priesthood. Little is known of his early adult life; reports suggest he travelled as a ship’s mate as far as French Guiana under the mistaken assumption he was destined for the port of Cobh, then known as Queenstown. It was here in the French-controlled South American jungle colony that he wrote what was to become his most celebrated work – ‘The Wanton Farrier’.
This magnum opus focused on a fictional eponymous farrier – a rake and larrikin based loosely on Tiberius himself, set in Dublin in the aftermath of Emmet’s rebellion of 1803. Due to his near-total lack of familiarity with the geography and topography of Dublin, himself having never actually visited the city, the book is riddled with historical and geographical inaccuracies – the chapter detailing the altercation with the one-legged vintner outside the ‘Kilmainham Pagoda’ being perhaps the most farcical. And yet, it is in his imagined depictions of the public houses of the time that Tiberius earned brief fame, his most celebrated and oft-repeated bon mot coming from the infamous 45-page dialogue between the young hero and the brusque copyist Maolsheachlainn McCluskey, during which the latter holds court on the merits of imbibing measures of porter so as to calibrate the fluids of the body in some sort of semi-divine equilibrium.
‘But one has to be so inelastic in their convictions as not to appreciate the Alexandrian depths of erudition contained within the cant and conversation of these fine snug walls. Certes, the pub is the gymnasium of the mind’.’
To read more about Tiberius, please read here –
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