From KCRW Santa Monica and KCRW.com, it's The Treatment.

Welcome to the treatment. I'm Elvis Mitchell. It's the home edition. You may know my guests from, oh, I don't know, Excalibur or Christopher Columbus,

or you might know him as Tom Reagan, or you might know him as Dr. Paul Weston from In Treatment.

You're definitely known from somewhere. My guest is Gabriel Byrne. His memoir, his book,

which I've had the greatest time reading is called Walking with Ghosts. And I'm

talking to the very talented Gabriel, Berne. Gabriel, so good to have you here. Thanks so much for

doing this. Thank you so much Elvis for inviting me. As I was telling you before we got started,

the book has really a lyric quality. And there's so much that in the reading of the book,

first of all, you move back and forward in time.

And there's a line from an old Russian novel where I think maybe it's Oblamoff, where

time is described as being like a breeze rolling past your face.

And the way you move back and forth and time feels like that to me.

Yes.

Well, one of the things I wanted to experiment with, I suppose,

was the notion of time, because I was trying to look back over the events of my life

and not just recount the events themselves, but to deal with the idea of the past and time and how that affects the

present.

The book in the opening page of it describes what my mother used to say to me, which is a line

from Percy B. Shelley, the Rom romantic English poet of the 19th century,

he said, you know that regret not the past, fear not the future.

And I tried to use that as a dictum to live my own life by,

but also I used it as a kind of a device to look at the events of the

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