Excerpt from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

publish Opened 2024-06-10, but I originally bookmarked this for myself on 2018-12-02. From Poems and literature I like.

Stephen watched the three glasses being raised from the counter as his father and his two cronies drank to the memory of their past. An abyss of fortune or of temperament sundered them from him. His mind seemed older than theirs: it shone coldly on their strifes and happiness and regrets like a moon upon a younger earth. No youth stirred in him as it had stirred in them. He had known neither the pleasure of companionship with others nor the vigour of rude male health nor filial piety. Nothing stirred within his soul but a cold and cruel and loveless lust. His childhood was dead or lost and with it his soul capable of simple joys, and he was drifting amid life like the barren shell of the moon. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce, pg. 95-96.

What a haunting passage. I can vividly picture the face and stony expression of the kid with these thoughts brewing in his head. It’s so descriptive and aesthetically compelling at the same time. Wow.