"Himself, his name and where he was"

On a walk the other day, I listened to an audiobook of James Joyce's "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man". I read it in spring 1983 during my first year at university; it was one of the works that steered me from physics to literature. But I hadn't read it since, and I wondered how much I'd remember. The walk was long enough to get me to a forgotten passage that quite vividly took me back to my youthful enthusiasm for the novel – when Stephen reads what he'd written in "the flyleaf of the geography": "himself, his name and where he was," all the way to "the Universe". (Andrew Shields, #111words, 5 June)

 

Stephen Dedalus

Class of Elements

Clongowes Wood College

Sallins

County Kildare

Ireland

Europe

The World

The Universe