Michael, as an adult narrator, reflects on the summer of 1936 in Donegal. He describes a haunting, dreamlike memory of his family dancing, suggesting that movement expressed what language could no longer capture.
MICHAEL: In that memory, too, the air is nostalgic with the music of the thirties. It drifts in from somewhere far away — a mirage of sound — a dream music that is both heard and imagined; that seems to be both itself and its own echo; a sound so alluring and so mesmeric that the afternoon is bewitc
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