Photo by Jude
Norbert Blei | August 23, 1935 – April 23, 2013
Stories at birth, before birth, every moment of our lives to the end. We breathe telling tales. And then what happened? The story ends? The story never ends. We are immortal. We are myth. We remember. — Norbert Blei
NOTES from the UNDERGROUND # 216 (& Poetry Dispatch) | August 18 , 2012
by
Norbert Blei
“Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say and not giving a damn.” –Gore Vidal
I’ve sung this song before: I’m having a hard time keeping up with everything. But I sing it again. The too many websites I maintain; writing my own books and other works; publishing the books of others I have every intention and desire to publish by my own small press, Cross+Roads Press; promoting neglected writers and publishers I promise myself (sometimes them) to bring to light—bur too often disappointing us both when I fail to do so for any number of the usual reasons; falling behind on preparations to teach, do readings and/or talks; maintaining communications (e-mail, snail mail, phone, texting, personal meetings) among a network of writers, family, friends…not trying to mention maintain some kind of private and social life beyond the written word—though I may be kidding myself since my life, for more than fifty years of it at least, one way or another, has been associated with the word and getting it out there.
So, yes, I’m behind. Again. Yes, I’m tired. More so than usual. But yes I’m enthused and renewed by all that I do and the many lives I try to reach… so it seems I must continue because this is who I am or seem to have become. Given all that’s on my plate, and no matter how frustrated I become every day, the writing is also on the wall: I’m going to leave a hell of a lot of unfinished business when the light goes out. And I’m just going to have to live with it. Saddest of all, the number of my own minimally noted and planned, partially written, almost finished, totally unwritten books–except for their daily life in my head, where I am an accomplished writer beyond belief, writing two or three books a week in thin air! How I wish there were more time. Or I had done it differently. Or I was different. But as Gore Vidal suggests in that opening quote: “Style is knowing who you are…” It takes time enough to just arrive there.
Which brings me back to the beginning of today’s commentary, which has been on my mind for sometime.
I wanted to say a few words about Vidal’s death…as well as a number of others, recently and not so recently…Christopher Hitchens, Ray Bradbury, Harry Crews…not to mention small press writers, Leonard Cirino, Todd Moore. etc. but I never got around to it. What a loss, all of them, Vidal especially. We can’t replace the likes of him, such truthsayers, on the American landscape. I guess ‘acerbic’ is the right word when it comes to him: “I am an obsessive rewriter, doing one draft and then another and another, usually five. In a way, I have nothing to say, but a great deal to add.” said Gore Vidal on writing.
He had much worth noting about the arts. Things many of us in practice need to be reminded of: “This is not at all bad, except as prose.” Or, “Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.” Vidal’s line: Though I could take him or leave him when it came to Warhol’s art, Vidal’s critique always makes me smile: “Andy Warhol is the only genius I’ve ever known with an I.Q. of 60.”
When it comes to politics in this country…how we will miss him in the upcoming election.
“Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.”
Better yet, weaving a writer’s words into the American political fabric: “As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.”
I’m especially mindful of authors and artists who refuse titles and honors by one interest or another: “I don’t want anything,” said Gore Vidal. “I don’t want a job. I don’t want to be respectable. I don’t want prizes. I turned down the National Institute of Arts and Letters when I was elected to it in 1976 on the grounds that I already belonged to the Diners Club.”
He IS missed.
Speaking of last words. I remain a huge lover of the works of James Joyce and have given up trying to defend him–especially ULYSSES. You either love him or hate him. Though you may hate him at one point in your life…give him time. We read him, are ‘taught’ him too early.
He needs to be aged. Don’t read or revisit ULYSSES until at least the age of 40.
I love this recent rebuke that appeared in the NYTimes. I have read only a little of Paul Coelho, but it did my heart good to read how Guardian critic Stuart Kelly responded to Coelho’s remarks:
Since its publication in 1922, James Joyce’s “Ulysses” has been put on trial for obscenity and subjected to reckless over-correction of its punctuation. But now the novel, widely considered one of the greatest works of the 20th century, has suffered perhaps its gravest indignity: being insulted by the Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho. In an interview with the Brazilian newspaper Folha de S. Paulo, Mr. Coelho…whose mystical novels, including “The Alchemist,” have sold a reported 140 million copies worldwide, declared that Joyce, right, had damaged the 20th-century novel by reducing it to “pure style.” “There is nothing there,” Mr. Coelho said. “If you dissect ‘Ulysses,’ it gives you a tweet.” Mr. Coelho, described in the article as being online “almost 24 hours a day,” also boasted of his social media prowess, declaring: “Twitter is my bar. I sit at the counter and listen to the conversations, starting others, feeling the atmosphere.” But within hours some corners of the bar had turned distinctly against him. “Coelho is, of course, entitled to his dumb opinion,” the critic Stuart Kelly wrote in a much retweeted post on The Guardian of London’s books blog, “just as I am entitled to think Coelho’s work is a nauseous broth of egomania and snake-oil mysticism with slightly less intellect, empathy and verbal dexterity than the week-old Camembert I threw out yesterday.” — jennifer schuessler NEW YORK TIMES 8.10.12
I leave you with this:
“Writers, since they have so many words, often have the last one.” –Gore Vidal.
POETRY DISPATCH No. 371 | May 5, 2012
The Best Prose Piece plus Selections from the Second Wave of Poems
EDITOR’S NOTE: I neglected to include the best “White Bicycle” prose piece in Friday’s posting which featured the three poems which best captured the image.
Part II leads off with the story by Jean Casey, followed by an at random selection of good poems which fell into a category the other judge and I saw as ‘the second wave.’ None of these selections are in any kind of order, they’re just good poems—which didn’t quite make the final three for reasons I previously mentioned. (And there are more, which I may or may not get around to featuring sometime.)
I would add one thing to the poetry finalists who were chosen and the prose writer. The other judge is an excellent reader, writer, editor who resides some distance from Wisconsin and would not have known any of the writers had I included their names—which I did not. I certainly expected there would be some disagreement over our choices, and we would have to work this out.
Once the noon deadline was reached, I made my final choices, in no particular order, just three poems and the one story I liked best, then awaited an e-mail from the other judge. There were no phone calls, no e-mail discussion between us. When the e-mail from the other judge arrived later in the day, I was beyond astounded to discover we both picked the exact same works! This almost never happens. –Norbert Bleib
by
Jean Casey
He had never won anything before, not a single thing, and now he had this amazing jackknife with all sorts of important attachments which made an important and heavy weight in his pocket. And all because of the Old Ellison Days parade. Oh, he knew it wasn’t a grand thing, but it was a yearly event with fire engines, some folks on horseback, an honor guard of veterans, a few simple floats, and a bunch of kids on decorated bikes and some politicians in shiny cars. This year they announced prizes to include the bikes. He didn’t give it much thought, because he was never a part of anything like that. Fat and slow with a hampering stammer, he hung around the edges of life. His 6th grade teacher tried, because she knew he was bright inside, but he avoided her help.
But this year, before the parade, he felt an urge to enter, especially knowing about the grand prize for bikes, that knife! It came to him one moonlit night when he lay in his bed before sleep that he could avoid somehow being seen as his lumpy self if he…yes! If he went covered up…yes, indeed! As a ghost! Everything must be white! His old bike was a dark maroon, rusty, tired. But, if he painted it…!
No way could he get by with this unless he consulted his mother. In the morning he found her with her mouth filled with clothes pins hanging a wash on the outside lines. She listened, fastening some socks with the stored pins. “The only white we got around here is flat wall paint left over from the living room, but you can use it, and you’ll need an old sheet to wear. I have one. We’ll have to cut eye holes in it, but that’s okay. I’ve got a chain link belt, come to think of it, that ought to help you cinch it in.”
He said, excited, “I think I’ll ask dad for his old straw hat! If he let me, I could paint it white too! I think a ghost should have a hat!” He didn’t stammer, she noticed.
Parade day, he said not a word to anyone, played his part, accepted his prize from the puzzled judge who asked for and didn’t get his name, because this ghost never talked. And now, the bike was propped up in back of the barn, and he would redo it bright red. His dad gave him money for the paint. The prize would stay in his pocket, unless he was at home whittling.
…remember the rides
all the bikes in my life
now white as ghost shadows.
Bonnie Hartmann
by Sharon Auberle
when everything is falling apart
my friend, when you’re stuck
in the horse latitudes
mired in a dark
night of the soul
when you’re no longer sleek
sexy and smoothfind the white bicycle
climb on that
fat-tired slow beast
pedal and huff and
laugh like you mean it
whistle sing shout
and cuss use words
your mama told you never topush that bike up a mountain
when you get to the top
when you’re near
to over the hill
when night is falling fast
jump on whoop and hollerride that old bicycle down
no brakes allowed
fireflies and stars
your only light
and when you wipe out
(and yes, honey, you will)
darkness like a big pillowy woman
will come along and wrap you up
whisper everything’s gonna be allright…no worries, baby,
she’ll carry all
your broken pieces home…
by Chris Halla
Parked here by an old man
shaped like a question markHoping a young girl in a yellow dress
would eventually stealhis white bicycle away
on a green, spring afternoon
by Alice D’Alessio
I dreamt I saw it standing all alone
beside the blue barn wall.
Ghost, what are you doing here?
I asked, recognizing every
feature – the torn seat, the gash
in the front tire from the time
we hit the tree; the dented fenders,
handlebars minus their grips
minus the bell that Mickey Loman stole;
and best of all, the fancy chain guard –
to keep my pants from catching on the chain
and getting greasy. My first bike,
bright and shiny blue it was
and trimmed in red.
It meant the war was over.The shadowy background
made the bike seem luminous.
You’re lookin’ pretty good, I said,
for an old guy. And then I thought
I heard it whisper, You too.
Let’s go race down Kaiser Hill,
shall we? There’s still time.
By Don Fraker
Nearly an albino,
But for her leathery dark barnacle of a seat,
Tattered, betraying her age –
Paint no cure for that condition.Mobya was my vessel,
Her now-departed basket ferrying books
From their orderly, patient moorings at the library
To the needy harbor of their offloading.Got her in junior high,
Whitened her in unspoken tribute to the first teacher who credited me with adult capacities,
His brine-soaked incantations of albatross, and mutiny, and whale,
Setting me a-sail on new-seen old adventures.Though now my daughter’s ark,
No more the carrier of tomes
Of late evanesced, ether-borne,
Her bleached carapace transports me still.
by Ralph Murre
the way she rode it
as much on clouds
as on concreteas much from as toward
on a pavement of dreamthe way I saw or didn’t see
the way it didn’t seem
she any longer needed me
to run along besidethe way the ride then
circled back in setting sunthe thing about a cycle
is the way it’ll repeather white bike may come back
may lean up
again against my shackwho knows when a cycle
or circle is complete?
by Paula Kosin
Even though it is not Easter
My mother hauled her old bike,
Tired, rusty but full
Of fond memories,
Out of the depths of the garage
And in the cool shade
Painted it white
The color of the Risen Lord
Of new life
And alleluias
And once she started
She just spray painted the whole damn
Thing
Tires, spokes, chain, pedals, handlebars
Every nook and cranny
Figuring that if a little paint made it look better
Then a lot would make it look wonderful
And the dirt and scratches and rust disappeared
Before our eyes
Like a miracle
And now it stands outside
Starkly propped against the blue sky garage
Drying and poised perhaps
For her ascension into Heaven
POETRY DISPATCH No. 370 | May 4, 2012
In the dream
of red balloons,of circus tents,
pied clowns andhighwire artists;
a white bicycletakes you there.
Alan Catlin
I’ve painted my old bicycle white.
It is the white of a childhood photograph,
the white of my sister’s first communion dress,
of an awkward smile missing front teeth
and ill-fitting gloves covering mudpie hands.
It is the white of my untucked shirt frozen in mid-laugh.Now my bicycle is ready to receive the rain.
Peter Kron
It’s lurking there in the shadows
of a granary,
ghost of a gone era
when the first farm motors
arrived on tractors
and young girls still rode to town
on two wheels
to fetch supplies home in baskets.Its basket long gone,
its handlebars like bleached longhorns
on a steer’s deserted skull,
it awaits the coolness of night
and its occasional riders,
dead writers.Tonight it welcomes
its favorite,
the lady in white.Come quietly after midnight,
watch Emily pedaling
straddling the worn saddle.
Ed Werstein
Editor’s Note: These were my original directions and suggestions:
Consider this another “Good Morning or Good Day Door County” photo… BUT for poets and writers out there (and others who may be interested), consider this a challenge, an opportunity, an invitation to write a poem (mainly) or prose piece (preferably short) titled: THE WHITE BICYCLE. Send it to me via e-mail only ASAP. Deadline: Thursday morning (before noon) May, 3, 2012. I’ll print, not necessarily “the best” White Bicycle poems, but my three favorites on Poetry Dispatch, Friday, May 4, 2012 or this coming weekend. Now get on that white bike and ride!–if you have it in you, if the photo, the white bike, something speaks to you. –Norbert Blei
This was a much more difficult than I imagined. And though many have asked me to do this more often, I just can’t. The time factor is enormous.
There were close to thirty entries. I made two sets of master copies of everything (deleting the name of each writer in a way even I unaware of the writer) and forwarded one master copy to a qualified writer-friend with instructions to pick three, only three, which caught what I was after: good writing, originality, brevity, etc. This was not easy for the guest reader/writer/friend/judge—or me.
Whatever failed to make the final three, failed… No, ‘failed’ is not the right word for the majority of entries since there were so many fine pieces if work BUT…some of the poems were too long…some of the poems were soaring, only to crash with a poor last line, a trite final stanza, a poor choice of words from the beginning or image…or no image(s) at all, falling into heavy-handed prose. Some need just a little final tuning to make them hum. Some need to be re-worked, re-envisioned entirely. Many of these (with a little more thought and a bit of rewriting) would certainly find a home in various publications.
For the last 12 hours or more I kept trying to bend the rules a bit: Why not six favorites instead of three…for certainly another three…no four, are right on the edge?
Maybe a list (long) of Honorable Mentions…?
Or how about a category which, for want of a better term, I would call “The Second Wave”? I have close to nine pieces that would easily slide in there. ALL of them SO GOOD! But this would go on for pages and pages…
What about separating the prose pieces from the poetry, place them by themselves?
And what to do with these illustrated works that came in out of nowhere???
After driving myself crazy with trying to make almost everyone happy, including myself, I decided to stick with the original idea of printing the three favorites. Plus only one prose piece. And wrap it up with the three illustrated submissions because…because I wish to share them.
I also promise to print some of the works online in the not too distant future.
Thank you all.
I have attached the poem and a photo of a “white bicycle” that is a few miles from my studio. Here in NM they call the roadside memorials markers to people killed in car accidents “descansos.” I don’t know what they are called elsewhere. But families or friends put up white crosses for pedestrians or car drivers who have been killed, or white bicycles for bicyclists who have been killed on the roadside near the scene of the accident. They remind you to slow down and take care. I do not know where they are made but they are well cared for and decorated with plastic flowers. Some are even decorated especially for Christmas and other holidays! -Kris Thacher
No one depends
OnThe white bi-
CycleParked in the
ShadowsBehind the Descansos
Garage.
Kris Thacher
The White Bicycle | Photo by Daniel Anderson
NOTES from the UNDERGROUND No. 215 (& Poetry Dispatch) | April 30, 2012
(Our Guide to the greatest lines of novel in the English language from Jane Austen to James Joyce—The Guardian)
Ulysses (1922)
“Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.” This is the classic third-person opening to the 20th-century novel that has shaped modern fiction, pro and anti, for almost a hundred years. As a sentence, it is possibly outdone by the strange and lyrical beginning of Joyce’s final and even more experimental novel, Finnegans Wake: “riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.”
Pride and Prejudice (1813)
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” The one everyone knows (and quotes). Parodied, spoofed, and misremembered, Austen’s celebrated zinger remains the archetypal First Line for an archetypal tale. Only Dickens comes close, with the beginning of A Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light etc…”
Jane Eyre (1847)
“There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.” The polar opposite to Austen and Dickens, this line plunges the reader into the narrative, but in a low-key tone of disappointed expectations that captures Jane Eyre’s dismal circumstances. Brontë nails Jane’s hopeless prospects in 10 words. At the same time, the reader can hardly resist turning the first page. There’s also the intriguing contrast in tone with her sister Emily, who opens Wuthering Heights with: “I have just returned from a visit to my landlord – the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with.”
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)
“You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by a Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly.” The influence of this opening reverberates throughout the 20th century, and nowhere more so than in JD Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye: “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like… and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”
The Luck of the Bodkins (1935)
“Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty, hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to talk French.” A classic English comic opening, perfectly constructed to deliver the joke in the final phrase, this virtuoso line also illustrates its author’s uncanny ear for the music of English. Contrast the haunting brevity of Daphne du Maurier in Rebecca, partly situated in the south of France, and also published in the 1930s: “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. “
Earthly Powers (1980)
“It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.” This is one of the supreme show-off first-person openings. Burgess challenges the reader (and himself) to step on to the roller coaster of a very tall tale (loosely based on the life of Somerset Maugham). It is matched by Rose Macaulay’s famous opening to The Towers of Trebizond: “‘Take my camel, dear,’ said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.”
I Capture the Castle (1948)
“I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.” A brilliant beginning to a much-loved English classic, which tells us almost all we need to know about the narrator Cassandra Mortmain. Quirky and high-spirited, Dodie Smith’s novel is really an exercise in nostalgia. Smith (subsequently famous for The Hundred and One Dalmatians) was living in 1940s California, and wrote this story, in a sustained fever of nostalgia, to remind her of home. Perhaps only an English writer could extract so much resonance from that offbeat reference to “the kitchen sink.”
The Bell Jar (1963)
“It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.” Postwar American first lines don’t come much more angsty or zeitgeisty than this. Compare Saul Bellow’s Herzog: “If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.” First published under the pseudonym “Victoria Lucas”, this first novel seems to parallel Sylvia Plath’s own descent into suicide. In fact, The Bell Jar was published only a month after its author’s tragic death in the bleak winter of 1963h resonance from that offbeat reference to “the kitchen sink.
The Secret History (1992)
“The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.” In this spooky opening, Tartt plunges the reader into the middle of a crime whose consequences will reverberate throughout the ensuing pages. Like all the best beginnings, the sentence also tells us something about the narrator, Richard Papen. He’s the outsider in a group of worldly students at Hampden College in rural Vermont. He was expecting a break from his bland suburban Californian life, but he doesn’t quite understand what he’s got himself into.”
Treasure Island (1883)
“Squire Trelawnay, Dr Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I take up my pen in the year of grace 17– and go back to the time when my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn and the brown old seaman with the sabre cut first took up his lodging under our roof.” Among the most brilliant and enthralling opening lines in the English language.
[from: The Guardian The Observer, Robert McCrum, Saturday, April 28, 2012]
Editor’s Note: I’m sure not everyone would agree with these ten choices, still it’s a pleasure to entertain them, recall some of these first lines or be introduced to others for the very first time. Though I agree most with Joyce’s, Ulysses and Twain’s, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, I would add some favorite first lines of mine:
Moby Dick (1851)
“Call me Ishmael.”
The Old Man and the Sea (1952)
“He was an old man who fished alone in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.”
Lolita (1955)
“Light of my life, fire of my loins.”
Invisible Man (1952)
“I am an invisible man.”
A Tale of Two Cities (1859)
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”
POETRY DISPATCH No. 365 | March 20, 2012
by
Norbert Blei
Editor’s Note: Happy St. Patrick’s Day—somewhat belatedly. Since my recent return, there’s been considerable catching-up, day and night. I hate to let St. Paddy’s pass me by without a few choice (Joyce) words.
I love the Irish. I love listening to their voices, their stories, their blarney…their music, their writing. (One of my best friends in Door County was the late, legendary bartender/character, St. Pat, who was so stereotypical ‘Irish’ that hardly anyone knew his real name). I’ve always respected their service to humanity–neighbor to stranger—anyone who needed a helping hand. I even once had a memorable, loveable Irish uncle (Jeremiah O’Brien) in our predominantly Eastern European tribe. He was certainly a presence both vital and unique. And though I’ve been to Ireland only once, years ago, I loved the country—and set off one morning in Dublin to retrace Joyce’s steps.
I brought Irish writing into the classroom since way back when (forty plus years ago) I was honored to teach Honors English on a high school level. The short story writers were the first to catch my attention. Frank O’Connor for one. Followed by the poets–Yeats, for sure. I came to “the essential Joyce” late. Around college, where and when I was certainly a loner on a small Midwestern campus, finding and making my own way, reading everything, ‘pretending’ to want to teach, to be a good teacher, but determined to become a better than good writer.
I came to Joyce entirely on my own. On hearsay. On his name continually popping up in my reading, in conversations with used bookstore owners who knew fiction. Joyce was never taught in any of the classes I took. But I seemed to have that seventh, eighth, or ninth sense of a budding writer: something that whispers you can’t begin to write or know anything about writing without a sense of Joyce in your head and heart.
Luckily I came to his collection of short stories, DUBLINERS, first. Had I opened ULYSSES or FINNIGANS WAKE before DUBLINERS, God knows what would have become of me. I’m entering “old man territory” presently, and still not ready for FINNIGAN/ “begin again”–and may have to carry it with me to the other side. A book probably written for eternity anyway.
In years past, there were St. Patrick’s Day celebrations in Chicago–the river turned green (Mayor Daley’s orders), parades, good Hibernian nights of good friends and good drinks and good conversation in Old Town at O’Rourke’s. Followed years later by a quieter time of my young family in the living room of a neighborhood apartment—and my persistent, traditional St. Paddy’s night: viewing “The Quiet Man” …John Wayne, Maureen O’Hara, Barry Fitzgerald…directed by John Ford. How could it possibly be any better, green beer or not?
Some of this has slipped by me in my later years since living here in the rural where I find myself in a distinctly unHibernian atmosphere–still staring at that copy of FINNIGANS WAKE on my shelf of Irish lit books.
But I do take one of my copies of DUBLINERS from the shelves once a year, usually around St. Patrick’s time. And if I don’t read all of the stories, only favorites…I never fail to read the last story in the book, “The Dead” (and later watch the film). I never fail to feel the passion in the lines, hear the music in Joyce’s prose, especially the final paragraphs of “The Dead”, one of the most celebrated passages in all of literature …never fail to read it aloud…give thanks for the Irish in Joyce, the blessing of his artistry…rejoice… – Norbert Blei
The air of the room chilled his shoulders. He stretched himself cautiously along under the sheets and lay down beside his wife. One by one they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age. He thought of how she who lay beside him had locked in her heart for so many years that image of her lover’s eyes when he had told her that he did not wish to live.
Generous tears filled Gabriel’s eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself which these dead had one time reared and lived in was dissolving and dwindling.
A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and. farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
[Excerpt, Joyce’s, “The Dead,” from his first collection of short stories, DUBLINERS.]
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