Today is Bloomsday, and in fact is the 100th bloomsday, the day that is the day James Joyce's Ulysses takes place.
I read Ulysses years ago, liked it but I'm sure I didn't get as much out of it as I could have. It took me 8 months, and I was pushing it even at that.
However one passage from it has stuck with me lucidly ever since, furnishing me with a phrase I repeat to myself often when appropriate it. I don't quite remember the context, some moment when Leopold Bloom is thinking about all the people that die every day around the world, and he says "shoving them under doublequick"... or something like that. Such a powerful, but brutally simple, thought.
I heard about the 100th Bloomsday weeks ago, but it took Google to remind me today. They commemorate it, as they do many holidays, with a cute little image on their front page. I thought it was supposed to be a cowboy at first.
In other news, it is finally summer, I think, here in Portland. It has been totally beautiful today, actually hot. I'm sitting on my back porch looking at the garden and looking at the internet on my laptop. A long yellow ethernet cable connects me in the backyard with cyberspace, and with the reminder that today is the day Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedulus lived their fictional odysseys in Dublin...
Posted by steev at Junio 16, 2004 08:18 PM