ch0g

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 calmer mood the critic in him could not but remark a strange prelude to the new crowning era in a season of melancholy and unrest.



He made up his tale of losses-- a dispiriting tale enough even were there no comments.



The air of false Christ was manifestly the mask of a physical decrepitude, itself the brand and sign of vulgar ardours; whence ingenuousness, forbearance, sweet amiability and the whole tribe of domestic virtues.



Sadly mindful of the worst, the vision of his dead, the vision (far more pitiful) of congenital lives shuffling onwards between yawn and howl, starvelings in mind and body, visions of which came a temporary failure of his olden, sustained manner, darkly beset him.



The cloud of difficulties about him allowed only peeps of light; even his rhetoric proclaimed transition.



He could convict himself at least of a natural inability to prove everything at once and certain random attempts suggested the need for regular campaigning.



His faith increased.



It emboldened him to say to a patron of the fine arts 'What advance upon spiritual goods?' and to a captalist 'I need two thousand pounds for a project.' 


He had interpreted for orthodox Greek scholarship the living doctrine of the Poetics and, out of the burning bushes of excess, had declaimed to a night policeman on the true status of public women; but there was no budge of those mountains, no perilous cerebration.



In a moment of frenzy he called for the elves.



Many in our day, it would appear, cannot avoid a choice between sensitiveness and dulness; they recommend themselves by proofs of culture to a like-minded minority or dominate the huger world as lean of meat.



But he saw between camps his ground of vantage, opportunities for the mocking devil in an isle twice removed from the mainland, under joint government of their Intensities and their Bullockships.



His Nego, therefore, written amid a chorus of peddling Jews' gibberish and Gentile clamour, was drawn up valiantly while true believers prophesied fried atheism and was hurled against the obscene hells of our Holy Mother: but, that outburst over, it was urbanity in warfare.



Perhaps his state would pension off old tyranny-- a mercy no longer hopelessly remote-- in virtue of that mature civilisation to which (let all allow) it had in some way contributed.



Already the messages of citizens were flashed along the wires of the world, already the generous idea had emerged from a thirty years' war in Germany and was directing the councils of the Latins.



To those multitudes not as yet in the wombs of humanity but surely engenderable there, he would give the word.



Man and woman, out of you comes the nation that is to come, the lightning of your masses in travail; the competitive order is employed against itself, the aristocracies are supplanted; and amid the general paralysis of an insane society, the confederate will issues in action.




Jas. A. Joyce 7/1/1904