Thursday, January 8, 2009

a little bit too honest I think

I want to show anybody who reads this a wonderful passage from James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

"He drew forth a phrase from his treasure and spoke it softly to himself:
-A day of dappled seaborne clouds.-
The phrase and the day and the scene harmonised in a chord. Words. Was it their colours? He allowed them to glow and fade, hue after hue: sunrise gold, the russet and green of apple orchards, azure of waves, the greyfringed fleece of clouds. No, it was not their colours: it was the poise and balance of the period itself. Did he then love the rhythmic rise and fall of the words better than their associations of legend and colour? Or was it that, being weak of sight as he was shy of mind, he drew less pleasure from the reflection of the glowing sensible world through the prism of a language many-coloured and richly storied than from the contemplation of an inner world of individual emotions mirrored perfectly in a lucid supple periodic prose."

So beautiful. I think Joyce is going to be my new best friend.
But, we can't be best friends because we live in two different times and come from two different backgrounds. He can wander the countryside and write prose, but I have to study and work and compete. If there was some way I could just tell you how much Joyce means to me I would. I would ramble on about how each passage was beautiful and written from a mind that decided to be free from all that whatever stuff that proves one is normal. Normal. Interesting word. An adjective that pretty much describes what the majority of everyone is doing. That's normal. Anything else is weird. Not popular. Not normal. Like Easterbrook lectured, ideas that have meshed into what is called "common sense". Get it?
While thinking about writing this out, I listened to Snow Patrol's Make This Go on Forever, and at the end, he sings, "please just save me from this darkness" Man, I am so depressing. And strangely honest at 1:30 in the morning. Eh whatever. I'm done. Joyce is pretty awesome and I want to read more of his works. I told a certain friend to mine to read the short story "The Dead" from his Dubliners. (haha yes, I still want you to read it!)
Okay. I'm being melodramatic and my self-consciousness is finally kicking in. I'm done.

-Jchoc, yo

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