DUBLIN — Trinity College Dublin has let it be known that the Book of Kells has grown too attached to Dublin to be moved. The manuscript, it is suggested, has settled in.
The view has been put forward with great tenderness. The Book is used to its routine. It knows its room. It is familiar with the light, the hum of the air handling, and the footsteps of the visitors who pass it every day. Uprooting it now, the thinking goes, would be unkind.
Nobody in Kells has been told how anyone knows the Book feels this way. It has not been asked. It cannot be asked. It is a Gospel book written by monks, and it has never expressed a preference for a postcode.
A fictional composite of Kells people who have listened to many reasons over many years said: "They kept it, and now they say it's grown fond of them. That is a strange argument. If I took your dog and kept it long enough, I would not be allowed to tell you it prefers my kitchen."
The attachment theory has been made to sound gentle. It is not gentle. It turns a holding into a relationship and a relationship into a reason. The Book has been held at Trinity since the 1660s, and that length of time is now being presented as proof that it belongs there. In Kells that is called something else. It is called keeping something long enough that people stop asking.
People in Kells have not stopped asking.
Trinity refused loans of the Book in 2000 and again in 2011. At the time, the town was told about security, environment and preservation. Feelings were not mentioned. The idea that the manuscript might be homesick for Dublin is, as far as anyone in Kells can tell, new. It has arrived just in time to be useful.
A fictional composite of people who have moved house with elderly relatives, and know exactly how it feels, said: "Of course moving is hard. Every family knows that. You plan it, you go slowly, you have the right people, the right room waiting. You don't tell your gran she can never go home because she's used to the wallpaper."
The town has prepared its own counter-evidence. A fictional composite of Kells historians, speaking for people who know where the monastery stood, put it simply: "The Book was made here. If it is attached to anywhere, it is attached to the place where every page was made. It just hasn't been allowed to say so."
Kells has also prepared a room. It is quiet. It can be kept at the right light, the right air and the right security, because none of those things depend on which county you are in. It has a case waiting and a lock on the door. It is not a temporary room for a visit. It is not a room for a loan. It is a room for the Book to come home to.
The Book has spent a long time in Dublin, 69 km from the town that made it. Any attachment it has to its current surroundings is the attachment of something that was never given the chance to leave. Kells does not need the Book to be fond of it. Kells needs it to be home.
In the meantime the Book remains in its room in Trinity, settled, unconsulted, and described as content by people who have never asked it. A fictional composite of every Kells grandmother who ever waited at a window said: "It'll know us when it sees us. Bring it home and see."