For whatever reason, I did not know Liam de Paor was dead until I read about his funeral - an ignorance which he would probably, but in that ineffably kind way he had, regard as a rather typical piece of sloppiness on my part. Liam was not sloppy, not lazy, but always keen and diligent and blessed with a mind which ranged far and wide for nourishment.
That mind was accompanied by a quite wonderful attentiveness to other people. He always kept an unwavering look of interest on his face, even as he had to digest what might be drivel. That attentiveness was born of a vast politeness which was both personal and representative of an older way, an antique, pre-urban and almost vanished Irish culture.
And with that attentiveness invariably came a smile - a puzzled smile, an irritated smile, a knowing smile, an agreeing smile - a smile for all occasions except one: he never offered, because he would not have known how to manufacture one, a superior or supercilious smile. That old courtesy again; it guided his life.
Smiling silences
His was indeed often a silent smile, for Liam was a great man for the silences, during which he would rummage through the finery he stored in his cerebral warehouse. Those silences, those smiling silences, might be a little unnerving - though they weren't intended to be - simply because you could be sure they were the precursor to something infinitely wiser and more knowing than whatever you might have been saying. And that something would always be offered with such delicacy and gentleness, in tone, word and expression. In other words, you didn't hit the ground with a bump. All right, you weren't as smart or as knowledgeable as he was, which was fine: he had merely given you the benefit of his mind. It was a transaction, a deal, in fact a favour; it was a true gift, not an act of condescension or of show.
And that, of course, is the mark of a great teacher, which is what Liam was: a truly great teacher. The assembly of letters, entrance, spells two words: one a verb, meaning to captivate, the other a noun, meaning a doorway or opening. Liam's mind magically captured the two meanings. When he spoke, it was quite captivating, a doorway opening before you into the treasury of his mind. For he and it had travelled widely through word and world, and on those travels he and it had filled their pockets with the wisdom and lore of everywhere. There seemed to be nothing he could not talk about - at various times he taught me Chinese history, American history, Japanese history, Irish history, archaeology, and all with equal ease.
Chinese history
I remember having a bet with an American student at UCD whether or not we could catch him out on some recondite part of Chinese history. By consulting a particular book we were sure he could never have seen, we prepared a perfectly impossible question, on the lines of "What was the name of the Emperor Chin's favourite concubine?" Not merely could he name the concubine; he gave reasons why the emperor preferred her to the 30 others in the imperial seraglio.
And he did so with that gentle but knowing smile, slightly hesitant in his delivery, as if volubility of reply might be boastful or showy. But of course that was the other characteristic of Liam's, which was I suppose a key to his politeness, but was a rock-hard part of who he was: he was so unbelievably modest, and in a very Irish way. There are, of course, post-colonial forms of Irish modesty which are self-denigratory out of some sense of cultural inferiority, but that was not Liam's modesty. Liam's modesty was a mark of the self-confidence of his culture, his identity, of his assuredness of Irish values and Irish ways.
He was modest because he was polite; polite because he was modest. The circularity of those virtues is as unbreakable as the relationship between Liam and the culture of which he was part. He truly embodied a way, a style, a set of civilised values, which are all but gone - yet he was not ostentatious about this. Indeed, it is only by thinking hard about it that I have made the connection between the man and the thing that created him: Ireland.
An old Ireland
It was an old Ireland, almost an extinct Ireland, which made him. He was proud of his nation without being narrowly nationalist; proud of his culture without being closed to others; proud of his race without being racist.
He certainly wasn't old-fashioned or reactionary - his mind was open and eager and enthusiastic. It's just that that mind, that moral character of his, were guided by values which are hard to put into words, but are more easily understood when you see them personified in the way that Liam personified them. It always comes back, I think, to his Irishness: it was so unqualified, so confident, so sure, so tolerant, so benign, so generous, so scholarly. Only two other men I have met have possessed that wise, scholarly, genial and generous Irishness - Cearbhall O Dalaigh and my uncle, Judge Tom Teevan. They are, all three, together now: I would that I could hear their words (but without actually joining them).