ch0b

ch0a: "The features of infancy are not commonly reproduced in the adolescent portrait"
ch0b: "In spite, however, of continued shocks, which drove him from breathless flights"
ch0c: "In their relations among themselves and towards their superiors they displayed"
ch0d: "One night in early spring, standing at the foot of the staircase in the library"
ch0e: "Isolation, he had once written, is the first principle of artistic economy"
ch0f: "His soul was soaring in an air beyond the world and the body he knew was purified"
ch0g: "In calmer mood the critic in him could not but remark a strange prelude"



[last]



In spite, however, of continued shocks, which drove him from breathless flights of zeal shamefully inwards, he was still soothed by devotional exercises when he entered the University.

cf? U10: "Liliata rutilantium te confessorum turma circumdet: iubilantium te virginum chorus excipiat."


About this period the enigma of a manner was put up at all comers to protect the crisis.

"enigma of manner" becomes the first principle of Joyce's style, reaching a maximum in Finnegans Wake


He was quick enough now to see that he must disentangle his affairs in secrecy and reserve had ever been a light penance.

cf composing sentences in his head before writing them down, rather than lots of trial and error


His reluctance to debate scandal, to seem curious of others, aided him in his real indictment and was not without a satisfactory flavour of the heroic.

cf U135: "Speaking about me. What did he say? What did he say? What did he say about me? Don't ask."


It was part of that ineradicable egoism which he was afterwards to call redeemer that he imagined converging to him the deeds and thoughts of the microcosm.

cf paranoid delusions


Is the mind of boyhood medieval that it is so divining of intrigue? Field sports (or their correspondent in the world of mentality) are perhaps the most effective cure, but for the fantastic idealist, eluding the grunting booted apparition with a bound, the mimic hunt was no less ludicrous than unequal in a ground chosen to his disadvantage.

(football would have deflated his ego)


But behind the rapidly indurating shield the sensitive answered.



Let the pack of enmities come tumbling and sniffing to the highlands after their game-- there was his ground: and he flung them disdain from flashing antlers.



There was evident self-flattery in the image but a danger of complacence too.



Wherefore, neglecting the wheezing bayings in that chorus which leagues of distance could make musical, he began loftily diagnosis of the younglings.



His judgment was exquisite, deliberate, sharp; his sentence sculptural.



These young men saw in the sudden death of a dull French novelist the hand of Emmanuel God with us; they admired Gladstone, physical science and the tragedies of Shakespeare; and they believed in the adjustment of Catholic teaching to everyday needs, in the church diplomatic.

Zola, 28Sep02?




[next]