James Joyces Trieste :: James Joyce Trieste Essays

And trieste ah trieste ate I my liver -- Finnegans WakeThe average traveler would not make a point of staying long in Trieste -- Cooks HandbookThe theme was born underground, one February morning in the Paris Metro. Weaving with tunnels the color of fluorescent light, we halted, stumbling over ourselves, before a yellowing tourism bill of fare that was strangely symbolic amongst heart advertisements and scrawled graffiti a photograph of a violent fairy-tale, a photograph of a castle white and turreted, match upon a jagged cliff and reaching sharply towards the limits of a fierce, wickedness body of water, at the depths of which was inscribed once simple and mysterious al-Quran Trieste. We knew the word. We stopped short not for the incongruous beauty of a washy poster, but for the faded beauty of a fabled city crowd Joyces Trieste, where he wrote most of Dubliners, all of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and much of Ulysses. Still I could see the unadulterated ou tline of his words in my mind, still I could remember training them for the beginning time in the white stillness of my bedroom, bound for Oxford the precise next day, eyes squeezed tight in desperate gratitude, and yes, ecstasy, and above all, carnal relief that as it turned out, reading is like this...and I vox populi well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to think yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms close to him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel 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 make up on the tail of Mollys final affirmation, becomes a part of the text an unknown region place and an unknown noise, hissed sound silently, meditatively, a word that rests dream-like on the blast of ones mind, givin g 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 regular(a) our first Joycean pilgrimage. If you ask Jon why he decided to spend his minor(postnominal) year abroad at Trinity College, Dublin, he will first joke some his trouble with foreign languages, and next tell you about the excellent English department.