Photo Enrico Contino

June 16 is Bloomsday in Dublin and wherever there are readers and writers who treasure James Joyce. The day is celebrated because Joyce's ULYSSES is the epic reconstruction of the minutiae of that single day, June 16, 1904, in Dublin, Ireland. The novel was first serialized in The Little Review in 1918, published in Paris in 1922 by Sylvia Beach (Shakespeare & Company).
To me there is no better, bigger or more important work in the English language. I wrote a thesis on ULYSSES, so I am certainly biased, but there are many authors, critics and readers who agree with me.
ULYSSES begins with a morning shave and conversation between to young men atop an old stone tower on the seacoast east of Dublin. The reader is immediately introduced to stream of consciousness that requires slow and careful reading. The novel captures the actions, dialogue and thoughts of its two main characters, Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom (not forgetting dear Molly Bloom). It is a tour de force of the language and the Irish soul. It is a poem that is seven hundred and sixty-eight pages long that leaves you breathless and wondering how the hell Joyce could have written such a masterpiece in one lifetime.
On June 16 every year, Joyce fans fill the hotel rooms and guest houses of eastern Ireland for the event. They do the tour. It begins at that tower (which still stands) and the procession of literary tourists winds into the city, from a school to a library, to a university to pubs and taverns and many other sites that are special because they appear in scenes in the book. It goes on through the entire night until morning. Many of the pilgrims consider it a going-to-Mecca. Many suffer terrible hangovers the next day. It is, though, a once-in-a-lifetime journey that I have yet to enjoy. I will do it.
ULYSSES is a precious but difficult work to read. As I wrote, it must be savored with care. It is to be devoured line at a time, scene by scene, with love. To express a few excerpts, I have reprinted a few here. They are from the Modern Library Edition, 1992, published by Random House.
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Woodshadows floated silently by through the morning peace from the stairhead seaward where he gazed. Inshore and farther out the mirror of water whitened, spurned by lightshod hurrying feet. White breast of the dim sea. The twining stresses, two by two. A hand plucking the harpstrings merging their twining chords. Wavewhite wedded words shimmering on the dim tide.
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Had Pyrrhus not fallen by a beldam's hand in Argos or Julius Caesar not been killed to death? They are not to be thought away. Time has branded them and fettered they are lodged in the room of the infinite possibilities they have ousted. But can those have been possible seeing that they never were? Or was that only possible which came to pass? Weave, weaver of the wind.
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Like him was I, these sloping shoulders, this gracelessness. My childhood bends beside me. Too far for me to lay a hand there once or lightly. Mine is far and his secret as our eyes. Secrets, silent, stony sit in the dark palaces of both our hearts: secrets weary of their tyranny: tyrants willing to be dethroned.
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--History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
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On his wise shoulders through the checkerwork of leaves the sun flung spangles, dancing coins.
(fonte Jondudeblog)