James Joyces Trieste :: James Joyce Trieste Essays

And trieste ah trieste ate I my liver -- Finnegans WakeThe number traveler would not make a point of staying long in Trieste -- Cooks HandbookThe idea was born underground, one February morning in the capital of France Metro. Weaving through tunnels the color of fluorescent light, we halted, stumbling over ourselves, before a yellowing tourism poster that was strangely symbolic amongst perfume advertisements and scrawled graffiti a photograph of a violent fairy-tale, a photograph of a fastness white and turreted, balanced upon a jagged cliff and reaching astutely towards the limits of a fierce, dark body of water, at the depths of which was inscribed once uncomplicated and mysterious war cry Trieste. We knew the develop. We stopped short not for the incongruous dish of a faded poster, but for the faded beauty of a legendary city James Joyces Trieste, where he wrote most of Dubliners, all of A depicting of the Artist as a Young Man, and much of Ulysses. Still I could see t he stark outline of his words in my mind, still I could remember reading them for the first time in the white motionlessness of my bedroom, bound for Oxford the very side by side(p) day, eyes squeezed tight in epic gratitude, and yes, ecstasy, and above all, physical relief that as it turned out, reading is same this...and I thought well as well him as another(prenominal) and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I compose my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could impression my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes. And then, nearly inseparable, simply, and in italics Trieste-Zrich-Paris, 1914-2 So that the word Trieste, gently italicized and right on the tail of Mollys final affirmation, becomes a give away of the text an unknown place and an unknown noise, hissed sound silently, meditatively, a word that rests dream-like on the f loor of ones mind, giving space, pause, to the nothingness that floods before thought somewhere that must be somewhere in this world, but perhaps not as one has known it. Yes. Trieste, I said, and we went. It was not our first literary pilgrimage, or even our first Joycean pilgrimage. If you ask Jon why he obdurate to spend his junior year abroad at Trinity College, Dublin, he will first joke about his trouble with foreign languages, and next tell you about the excellent English department.