Final chapters describe the artist awakening. Stephen tries to come up with a theory of art/beauty/truth based on Aristotle and Aquinas. I didn't follow the argument, but what does come through is the excitement of the life of a mind, and also the excitement of a 21 year old starting his life. No other book that I can think of makes the mind, grappling with difficult ideas, so thrilling. We are in Stephen's mind as he composes his "ardent ways" poem--the artist beginning his work.
Great passages:
Sickness in the infirmary--he covers his ears, then uncovers them, and the sound is like a train roaring through a tunnel.
As a boy, he hears song: Bury my in the old churchyard . . . he is immediately struck with the power of the words, "so beautiful and so sad." Then, later, his love of the Count of Monte Cristo
Dinner argument over Parnell (Dante, Mr. Casey, S. father) is the greatest argument I've ever read
Cricket: balls hitting bats: "They said: pick, pack, pock, puck. Little drops of water in a fountain slowly falling int he brimming bowl."
Eileen with her ivory hands, cool and thin
Feeling of being an outsider at Clongowes, not like other boys, but then later a sense of jealousy almost as he watches his father, completely in the moment, drink with his buddies. The curse of the mind that sees beyond the obvious. The joy (his father) that comes only to those who live in the obvious. "His childhood was dead or lost and with it his soul capable of simple joys and he was drifting amid life like the barren shell of the moon."
Studying history, realizing that all the men he studied are dead . . . what does it profit a man?
Rejection of the priesthood, revulsion actually.
The call to leave Ireland: "piercing like a star the dusk of silence. Again! Again! Again! A voice from beyond the world was calling."
"A girl stood before him in midstream, alone and still, gazing out to see. She seemed like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird." Chapter 4 epiphany famous for good reason. "To live, to err, to fail, to triumpp\h, to recreate life out of life. A wild angel had appeared to him the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error and glory. On and on and on and on!"
Leaving Ireland: "The soul has a slow and dark birth, more mysterious than the birth of the body. When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets."
Truth beheld by the intellect; beauty by the imagination
"It was that windless hour of dawn when madness wakes and strange plants open to the light and the moth flies forth silently."
Does writing get any better than that?
Great passages:
Sickness in the infirmary--he covers his ears, then uncovers them, and the sound is like a train roaring through a tunnel.
As a boy, he hears song: Bury my in the old churchyard . . . he is immediately struck with the power of the words, "so beautiful and so sad." Then, later, his love of the Count of Monte Cristo
Dinner argument over Parnell (Dante, Mr. Casey, S. father) is the greatest argument I've ever read
Cricket: balls hitting bats: "They said: pick, pack, pock, puck. Little drops of water in a fountain slowly falling int he brimming bowl."
Eileen with her ivory hands, cool and thin
Feeling of being an outsider at Clongowes, not like other boys, but then later a sense of jealousy almost as he watches his father, completely in the moment, drink with his buddies. The curse of the mind that sees beyond the obvious. The joy (his father) that comes only to those who live in the obvious. "His childhood was dead or lost and with it his soul capable of simple joys and he was drifting amid life like the barren shell of the moon."
Studying history, realizing that all the men he studied are dead . . . what does it profit a man?
Rejection of the priesthood, revulsion actually.
The call to leave Ireland: "piercing like a star the dusk of silence. Again! Again! Again! A voice from beyond the world was calling."
"A girl stood before him in midstream, alone and still, gazing out to see. She seemed like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird." Chapter 4 epiphany famous for good reason. "To live, to err, to fail, to triumpp\h, to recreate life out of life. A wild angel had appeared to him the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error and glory. On and on and on and on!"
Leaving Ireland: "The soul has a slow and dark birth, more mysterious than the birth of the body. When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets."
Truth beheld by the intellect; beauty by the imagination
"It was that windless hour of dawn when madness wakes and strange plants open to the light and the moth flies forth silently."
Does writing get any better than that?
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