city as palimpsest

“The city that Joyce portrays in Dubliners has both receded into the distant past and remained insistently visible; Dublin, like all cities, is a sort of palimpsest, in which the past is always and everywhere legible beneath the surface of the present. Joyce’s writing adds a further layer, which for me is just as real, and as plainly visible, as the actual past.”
–“100 Years After Dubliners, James Joyce’s Dublin—and Mine“, by Mark O’Connell