Yesterday was Bloomsday, an event UD has in the past celebrated in very high style (see her posts about it); but this covid year has meant a much quieter commemoration. As in, she stood for around five minutes late last night in her new garden (dedicated to Mr UD‘s sister, whose willingness to buy our share of our country house freed up funds for the project)
and thanked whatever gods there be for James Joyce, for Ulysses, for the late night scene in Bloom’s garden when two damaged sensitive men pee together.
The trajectories of their, first sequent, then simultaneous, urinations were dissimilar: Bloom’s longer, less irruent, in the incomplete form of the bifurcated penultimate alphabetical letter, who in his ultimate year at High School (1880) had been capable of attaining the point of greatest altitude against the whole concurrent strength of the institution, 210 scholars: Stephen’s higher, more sibilant, who in the ultimate hours of the previous day had augmented by diuretic consumption an insistent vesical pressure.
I have said that the mad, sad world should never settle us into despondency; but, you know, easy to say that when you’ve been blessed by – those same gods? – with a silly, high-spirited disposition. Art and nature are, however, there for all of us, sorrowful and euphoric.
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I mean, man oh man. Listen to Saul Bellow read the end of Henderson the Rain King (start at 37:30) and try not to weep with joy.