"You lay on the floor and howled, howled at the top of your lungs, howled because death was inside you and you didn't want to die."
The third in my autobiography triptych reading wave. Fast, punching you in the face with his lines that are hurled rhythmically at you. Perhaps it is the usage of 'you', constantly 'you, you you', without ever letting go that made reading this book such a ride.
I should study it more closely. See how he weaves normal occasions into a wonderful story.
Quoting Keats, something he scribbled in the margins; "the bitter outcry of a young man who knew he was headed for an early grave, darkly underscored by the word now in the first line" :
This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calm'd - see here it is -
I hold it towards you.
James Joyce in Paris in the 1920s, standing around at a party eighty-five years ago when a woman walked up to him and asked if she could shake the hand that wrote Ulysses. Instead of offering her his right hand, Joyce lifted it in the air, studied for a few moments, and said: "Let me remind you, madam, that this hand has done many other things as well."
"The dead are still there, and the Towers are there as well - pulsating in memory, still present as an empty hole in the sky."
