This was UD‘s toast, at Ireland’s Four Fields, to James Joyce on Bloomsday. She raised her pomegranate martini; Courtney and Mary Anne raised their Guinnesses.
The bar was pretty quiet; UD wanted a quiet Bloomsday this year. Her tattered and taped up copy of the book sat on the table by the shepherd pie and the apple pie. While waiting for her friends (both were once students of hers at GW), UD read the opening pages of the book, puzzling as ever over why the words
the light untonsured hair, grained and hued like pale oak
have such surpassing beauty. They’re like these lines from a James Merrill poem:
I hear the ferrous, feather-light diluvian / Lava clink at a knife-tap from our guide.
What is it? The delicate combination of hard Ks and gentle Ls?
My students – my friends – were
brimming with life. We laughed.
At the Cleveland Park metro we
embraced and said goodnight.
June 18th, 2009 at 4:16PM
Glad to have spent the most undercelebrated day of the year with my favorite professor. Countdown to Bloomsday 2010: T minus 363 days and a few hours.