A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man by James Joyce: With Original Annotated
- ISBN-10
- ISBN-13
- 9798542618760
- Pages
- 293
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2021-07-23
- Author
- James Joyce
Description
I am concurrently reading two enormously stimulating and intellectually challenging books - both of which I can recommend strenuously - My Bright Abyss and Holy Desperation. Each of these, distinctly different and imperiously individualistic, is by a writer who takes James Joyce's commandment to become the conscience of our race at face value. Each does that differently - the former by a disinterested poetic conscience - and the latter by a socially committed religious conscience. But each is - or has been for most of their life - a pariah. A castoff from suburbia. If you eschew the usual head games and (slightly more outré) games of concupiscence suburbia tends to excel at, you are likely one of us. I say us, for with this book, like they with theirs, I first became a Stephen Dedalus. The three of us may fake some kind of obedience to the norm, but our hearts will always be in those mystical epiphanic moments which make life worthwhile: those rare moments which are intimations of immortality, as Wordsworth puts it. When life is a religious experience it is worthwhile. And it has to be a life of timeless moments. A day without the maximum effort it takes to generate an epiphanic moment (or much better, a SHARED epiphanic moment) is a day not lived. Joyce knew that. And he knew he could no longer make Ireland his home. For Ireland back at the turn of the century was ruled by a malicious devil - which Plato calls doksa, or opinion - the symptom of a stagnant society in ferment. When a land is dangerously deadlocked - as we have witnessed in our own time - that same violent devil, doksa, rears its head: and we get viciously vapid tweets masquerading as moral substance. But Suburbia rarely confronts, but festers. Hence its release valve, in games. However, to outcasts from conformity like James Joyce, Christian Wiman (My Bright Abyss) and Heather King (Holy Desperation) we must CHANGE. We must become Self-Aware. And more importantly than that, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, we must have faith. Have faith that change is possible; Have faith that WE can promote Change through Awakeness; Have faith that the Kingdom is at Hand: AND have faith that all our literary epiphanies PROVE it.
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Other editions
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- 2020-12-11
- 332 pages
- Paperback
- Independently Published