Bloomsday yesterday. Riverran. I had other tasks to attend to until about 5PM, so I couldn't follow the chronology of the day, but thanks to perhaps the finest codex form of the text available (the clear-as rain first edition from Bodley Head), I was able to get to Gertie and Cissy by the time the library closed, and I was clock-synchronous by 9PM. Things fell off shortly afterwards, and I abandoned the trek near the end of the medieval hospital episode. The first few hours in the library, partly due to the pace, were simply exhilirating. I must read it in Dublin some year. Not necessarily on the trek, but just there.
As I picked up the reading on the e-reader outside, I happened to sit down next to some women who perhaps roughly corresponded to those two in desires and unsophistication, and it was a fascinating, and very depressing study in contrasts. We are somehow incapable of sensing the poetry and meaning in life. There was blaring background music, of course (modern equivalent of the fireworks), and I suppose, around the corner at St. Agnes, there might have been a similar Vespers (though they've moved the Extraordinary Form Mass to a much more depressing location in the Garment District these days), but everyone was wrought to such a high pitch of nervous tension, a high frequency, perhaps, that speech, thought and action seemed unnaturally overwrought and inexpressive. Not to mention the usual indolent emptiness and malice, and covetousness, and what have you.
O tempora, O mores...
One odd event in the reading. It was a fine old edition, and in reasonably good shape, and perhaps the actual text Joyce might have looked at if he had ever visited the main library collections here, but someone had creased a few pages, and dogeared them, and there were a few tears at the bottom. As I read, one of the heavily-creased dog-ears separated, and suddenly, the nature of the event changed. As Prospero's book had instantly been drowned in the realities of the world. I carefully placed the tiny corner back inside the book, and showed the dog-earing and creases to the librarian when I returned it, but the reading after that point changed. The angels with flaming swords stood at the gates of the garden, and meaning had to be achieved by work, and focus.
So, reader, I worked.