"To-day 16 June 1924 twenty years after. Will anyone remember this date?" - James Joyce

It is with a wry and wistful heart that I remind you all that today is the One Hundredth "Bloomsday". June 16th, 1904 - the day lived by "Leopold Bloom", imagined and recorded moment on moment by James Joyce in Ulysses, which no, I have not read the whole way through.

I'll never forget reading Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man covertly in my Uber-Traditionalist Catholic college, and being spotted by an upperclassman. She was shocked, and her eyes opened very wide.

"You're reading Joyce?"

I was just dipping my toes in the sea of rebellion that would later break out into such a violent storm, but still, I coloured with indignation. My budding pride and belief in intellectual freedom was poked for the first time. Defiantly:

"Yes. He's an important literary figure. Why shouldn't we read him?"

She was unconvinced.

"Debatable. Dr. ---------- says Joyce was merely a stylist and his works won't endure."

I opened my mouth to begin an argument I wasn't ready for, but I saw curiosity flicker in her for a second, and she cut me off at the pass. Leaning closer, confidentially, she asked:

"What's...it like?"

I was feeling wicked, I'll admit.

"Joycey."

The terrible pun was lost on her and she scurried away. But eighteen-year-old-I felt very smug and clever and witty for at least three days afterwards.

I was going to wallow a bit in some petty personal significance...Bloom was my name, for six months. But for fuck's sake, I'd rather let you read my favourite words by the man himself.

First, rather stern, but relevant to blogging:

"This triviality made him think of collecting many such moments together in a book of epiphanies. By epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or gesture, or in a memorable phrase of the mind itself. He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that the themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments."
-- from Stephen Hero

Also from Stephen Hero - a very clear expression of what it is to belong to this tribe (my own tribe!) of Hysterical Wonderers:

"The romantic temper, so often and so grievously misinterpreted and not more by others than by its own, is an insecure, unsatisfied, and impatient temper which sees no fit abode here for its ideals and chooses therefore to behold them under insensible figures. As a result of this choice it comes to disregard certain limitations. Its figures are blown to wild adventures, lacking the gravity of solid bodies, and the mind that has conceived them ends by disowning them."

Next, one very, very close to my heart....

"He tried to weigh his soul to see if it was a poet's soul. Melancholy was the dominant note of his temperament, he thought, but it was melancholy tempered by recurrences of faith and resignation and simple joy. If he could give expression to it in a book of poems perhaps men would listen."
-- from Dubliners, "A Little Cloud"

What those who know me well have said to me often in my more Catholic moments...

"'It is a curious thing, do you know,' Cranly said dispassionately, 'how your mind is supersaturated with the religion in which you say you disbelieve.'"
-- from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man


and from the same book, my personal battle cry:

"Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race."