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.
James JoyceA wave of yet more tender joy escaped from his heart, and went coursing in warm flood along his arteries. Like the tender fires of stars moments of their life together, that no one knew of, or would ever know of, broke upon and illumined his memory..
James JoyceWrite it, damn you, write it! What else are you good for?
James JoyceShe asked me why I never came, said she had heard all sorts of stories about me. This was only to gain time. Asked me, was I writing poems? About whom? I asked her. This confused her more and I felt sorry and mean. Turned off that valve at once and opened the spiritual-heroic refrigerating apparatus, invented and patented in all countries by Dante Alighieri...
James JoyceThey lived and laughed and loved and left.
James JoyceThat is horse piss and rotted straw, he thought. It is a good odour to breathe. It will calm my heart. My heart is quite calm now. I will go back.
James JoyceHe 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 words better than their associations of legend and colour? Or was it that, being as 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 manycoloured and richly storied than from the contemplation of an inner world of individual emotions mirrored perfectly in a lucid supple periodic prose?
He passed from the trembling bridge on to firm land again.
Through this image he had a glimpse of a strange dark cavern of speculation but at once turned away from it, feeling that it was not yet the hour to enter it. But the nightshade of his friend's listlessness seemed to be diffusing in the air around him a tenuous and deadly exhalation and he found himself glancing from one casual word to another on his right or left in stolid wonder that they had been so silently emptied of instantaneous sense until every mean shop legend bound his mind like the words of a spell and his soul shrivelled up, sighing with age as he walked on in a lane among heaps of dead language. His own consciousness of language was ebbing from his brain and trickling into the very words themselves which set to band and disband themselves in wayward rhythms:
The ivy whines upon the wall
And whines and twines upon the wall
The ivy whines upon the wall
The yellow ivy on the wall
Ivy, ivy up the wall.
Did any one ever hear such drivel?
If we must have a Jesus let us have a legitimate Jesus.
James JoyceThis is the way to the museyroom. Mind your boots goan out.
James Joyce« prima precedente
Pagina 16 di 41.
prossimo ultimo »
Data privacy
Imprint
Contact
Diese Website verwendet Cookies, um Ihnen die bestmögliche Funktionalität bieten zu können.