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This was my favorite book since AP Lang 2014 until last year when my reading renaissance begin. Tapping back in for a book club! Wonder how I will feel about it now after so much has changed for me.

“The true autodidact is in exactly the same degree a theodidact, as another author has said (lol), or to use an expression less redolent of the intellectual, he is one who cultivated philosophy on his own in the same degree one who tends the things of God. Therefore the person who, in respect of guilt, is educated by anxiety will rest only in the Atonement.”

“…that is an adventure every human being has to live through, learning to be anxious so as not to be ruined either by never having been in anxiety or by sinking into it. Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate.”

“Anxiety can be compared with dizziness… anxiety is the dizziness of freedom that emerges when spirit wants to posit the synthesis, and freedom now looks down into its own possibility and then grabs hold of finiteness to support itself.”

Virsilov…. Good guy??

This book a bloodbath so far!

Not a Tatiana fan. lmao

19th century investment advice that’s still relevant today >>>

“ Unable to hold back, I’ve sat down to record the story of my first steps on life’s path, when I could actually get by without doing so. There’s one thing I know for sure: I’ll never again sit down to write my autobiography, even if I live to be a hundred. A person must be all too miserably enamored of his own self to write about himself without shame. “

This shit crazy. Lmao

Wtf man 💀

Good lord.

This chapter, written like a romance novel, was beautiful and awesome. Next is the most difficult chapter of the book as described by Joyce himself: oxen of the sun.

Every chapter I finish I fall more and more in love with this book. The range of emotion and prose truly blows me away.

Joyce is just insane fam. His supreme command of the English language. He has used hundreds of words I’ve never heard of so far, some he makes up himself by combining languages lmao. It’s so beautiful. And he almost never repeats, which is insane considering the length of the book. Nothing is out of place. And everything is M E A N T

Bloom is evolving. Whereas before he had a vegetarian lunch, now he has a big, meaty, and gruesome sandwich. Also how he used to avoid Blazes, having a near heart attack seeing him in the street, now he follows. Checks what’s going on. A near confrontation.

Lmao The chapter sirens starts off with a bunch of random small sentences that is supposed to emulate the sounds of an orchestra warming up before performance

Joyce is just flexing now. Taking a significant turn from telling the story in relation to time passing to just telling it with space as the independent variable of plot.

Describing the goings on of 12+ characters in 19 vignettes in just 35 pages we get a photorealistic description of Dublin.

Circe warns Odysseus that none have survived the wandering rocks and to avoid them. Joyce ignores this advice.

Have goosebumps hearing him talk about the evolution of him and Ghost’s friendship and the creation of OB4CL

Scylla and Charybdis was the most sophisticatedly flamboyant dialogue yet, and I found it absolutely hilarious.

Joyce comparing himself to Shakespeare just to end with himself not even believing it. 🥲

[i] parallaxing [/i]