A little bit of literature

“They seemed to listen, he on the upper step and she on the lower. She came up to his step many times and went down to hers again between their phrases and once or twice stood close beside him for some moments on the upper step, forgetting to go down, and then went down. His heart danced upon her movements like a cork upon a tide. He heard what her eyes said to him from beneath their cowl and knew that in some dim past, whether in life or in reverie, he had heard their tale before. He saw her urge her vanities, her fine dress and sash and long black stockings, and knew that he had yielded to them a thousand times. Yet a voice within him spoke above the noise of his dancing heart, asking him would he take her gift to which he had only to stretch out his hand. And he remembered the day when he and Eileen had stood looking into the hotel grounds, watching the waiters running up a trail of bunting on the flagstaff and the fox terrier scampering to and fro on the sunny lawn, and how, all of a sudden, she had broken out into a peal of laughter and had run down the sloping curve of the path. Now, as then, he stood listlessly in his place, seemingly a tranquil watcher of the scene before him.”

Vocabulary build-up

The noun reverie means “a state of meditation or fanciful musing; a daydream; a fantastic, visionary, or impractical idea.”

The adverb to and fro means “moving from one place to another and back again.” Close synonyms are “back and forth” and “here and there.”

Comments

James Joyce was born on 2 February 1882 in Dublin, eldest of ten surviving children born in an impoverished family. Educated first at Jesuit Colleges, Joyce entered the Royal University (now University College, Dublin) in 1898. Four years later Joyce left Dublin for Paris with the intention of studying medicine but soon his reading turned more to Aristotle than physic. He returned to Dublin due to his mother's illness in 1903, when he met his wife, Nora Barnacle, a young woman from Galway. The couple moved to Trieste, Italy, where they lived for more than a decade. Despite disputes with recalcitrant publishers, severe eye problems and the pressures of a growing family (both a son and a daughter were born), Joyce managed to write his first books. He also began, abandoned, began again, and completed “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”, first published in 1916. James Joyce's “Portrait of an Artist” is one of the most significant literary works of the twentieth century, and one of the most innovative. Its originality shocked contemporary readers, who found its treating of the trivialities of daily life as indecorous, and its central character unappealing. The novel charts the intellectual, moral, and sexual development of Stephen Dedalus, from his childhood listening to his father's stories through his schooldays and adolescence to the brink of adulthood and independence, and his awakening as an artist. Growing up in a Catholic family in Dublin in the final years of the nineteenth century, Stephen's consciousness is forged by Irish history and politics, by Catholicism and culture, language and art. The protagonist's story mirrors that of Joyce himself, and the novel is both startlingly realistic and brilliantly crafted, not to mention that it is one of the founding texts of Modernism and the precursor of the acclaimed “Ulysses”.