Greetings!

This is, above all, NOT some random collection of quotations randomly tossed together by some enigmatic and bored outsider from the American Midwest who’s (once again) too high on microdoses of magic mushrooms, edible marijuana, and too much green tea and Gabapentin. Instead, this is a very, very, very, very, very, very, very carefully curated, selected, shaped, arranged, and FORMED collage of quotations that can stand as its own separate work of art on many many many many levels, just as the collages of Picasso and Braque could do the same. I do not limit nor count my borrowings, said Montaigne, I weigh them.

As such, this tissue of words can be utilized primarily in one of two ways, or (preferably) in both-at-once ways. If you, the Reader, can think of other ways to use these (this), please feel free to freely do so at whatever levels or in whatever ways your mind or nerves can handle.

A: It can be used as an exceedingly useful summary of the entire life’s work of the Irish author James Joyce (and James Joyce himself WAS his work at a level that perhaps surpasses (almost) anyone else).

B: It can be used as a piece of twenty-first century wisdom writing (like an advice column for seekers) all in its own right.

James Joyce is one of the funniest writers who ever lived which is to say he’s one of the greatest comic writers who ever inhabited Planet Earth, as the brilliant genius Anthony Burgess never tired of pointing out to anyone who’d listen to him (and it was usually far fewer than you might imagine, even after a certain novel of his was made into an exceedingly famous motion picture which had almost nothing to do with the original novel at all).

Joyce also possessed (as do so many true comedians) incredible wisdom about life.

Read on 2 find out.

(FYI: this is also a companion piece to my forthcoming written work “Silence, Exile, and Cunning: a Credo, a Screed, a Missive, a Memoir.” I call it a “written work” because it doesn’t have a genre except perhaps for the ones enumerated in the title. It shall come forth tomorrow.)

“Shut your eyes and see.”

“Let my country die for me.”

“Love loves to love love.”

“First we feel. Then we fall.”

“As I walked along in the sun I remembered old Cotter’s words and tried to remember what had happened afterwards in the dream.”

“We walked along the North Strand Road till we came to the Vitriol Works and then turned to the right along the Wharf Road.”

“Meeting her a third time by accident he found courage to make an appointment. She came.”

“The sad quiet greyblue glow of the dying day came through the window and the open door, covering over and allaying quietly a sudden instinct of remorse in Stephen’s heart.”

“Think you’re escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.”

“The object of the artist is the creation of the beautiful. What the beautiful is is another question.”

“The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.”

“It is as painful perhaps to be awakened from a vision as to be born.”

“You can still die when the sun is shining.”

“I will not serve that in which I no longer believe and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can.”

“The whole face is of an ascetic, inspired, whole souled, wonderfully passionate man. It is Christ, as the Man of Sorrows, his raiment red as of them that tread in the winepress. It is literally Behold the Man.”

“Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.”

Dale Williams Barrigar

(Image provided by DWB)