Status Updates From The Lake

On page 36-37 of Niall Williams The Time of the Child, George Moore's The Lake is referenced for the 1st time.
William's also presents the interiority of his character Dr Troy while he is driving to and from visiting patients, not because he must, but because this is his activity (like Lake walking) that allows him to soul-search.
In The Lake the drama passes within the priest's soul, as it does too with Dr Troy.

"my reason for liking 'The Lake' is related to the very great difficulty of the telling, for the one vital event in the priest's life befell him before the story opens...it was necessary to recount the priest's life during the course of his walk by the shores...weaving his memories continually, without losing sight, however, of the long, winding, mere-like lake, wooded to its shores, with hills appearing into mist

https://books.google.com/books?id=wmm...

"Does anyone know exactly what he believes?"

"But as all roads are said to lead to Rome, so do man's thoughts lead to the woman that lives in his heart..."

"The world has seen many sunsets, but every one is wonderful to him or her whose life is at crisis."

"This journey means a great deal to me: it is a thing that may never happen again in my life, and if I don't write down my impressions they will pass away like the clouds. However intense our feelings may be at the time, a few hours obliterate a good deal, and at the end of a fortnight nearly everything but the facts are forgotten."

"I write these things to you because I wish you to remember that, when religion is represented as hard and austere, it is the fault of those who administer religion, and not of religion itself."

"Ireland had certainly attained to a high degree of civilization in the seventh and eight centuries, and if the Danes had not come and interrupted the renaissance--the first of all the renaissances--Ireland might have rivaled Italy."

"...though I was a dissonance in Ireland, I am part of the English harmony. And it is such a pleasure to find one's self in harmony with one's surroundings, everything going to the beat, one's ideas chiming with the ideas about one, one's work interesting one so much that one goes to it smiling along the street, anxious to be at it, wondering what the result of the day's work will be..."

"Life is as mysterious as death, and the more we think of it the more wonderful does it seem to us."

https://books.google.com/books?id=wmm...

https://books.google.com/books?id=wmm...

https://books.google.com/books?id=wmm...

Poor Oliver. We know what's going on even if he doesn't.

Good so far. Reminded me of the original use of "wonderful".