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“My most recent visit to the Iveagh Gardens was in the company of my younger daughter. She was sixteen at the time. I had brought her with me to show her a place precious to me, where I was once sweetly and unhappily in love. However, I discovered...that she knew the place well. Her boyfriend...lived nearby, and it was here, on weekdays after school, that they would come to walk, and be together, discussing the great issues of the day, finding out about each other, learning to grow up. As she told me this, in her not unkind though offhand way--the young are entirely deaf to the joggling palpitations of an aged heart--I had a sense of the magical timelessness of such places, and of the uses to which we put them. We change, we age, we stay or move away, and in time we end. The park, however, endures. It is a thought, I think, to comfort, if only by a little, the most distressed of hearts.” — John Banville