Some of my fave passages from this book:

“I can be neither nothing nor everything: I’m just the bridge between what I do not have and what I do not want.”

“Having seen with what lucidity and logical coherence certain madmen (with method in their madness) justify their crazed ideas to themselves and to others, I have lost for ever any real confidence in the lucidity of my own lucidity.”

“The most painful feelings, the most piercing emotions are also the most absurd ones—the longing for impossible things precisely because they are impossible, the nostalgia for what never was, the desire for what migh have been, one’s bitterness that one is not someone else, or one’s dissatisfaction with the very existence of the world.”

“There is nothing worse than the contrast between the natural splendour of the inner life, with its own Indies and countries still to be explored, and the sordidness, even when it isn’t really sordid, of the everydayness of life. Tedium weighs more heavily when it does not have inertia as an excuse. The tedium of the great and the busy is the worst tedium of all.”

If Dubliners were about Lisbon, and was also a collection of stories about a simple, lonely, desperate man, and was also randomly assembled from a chest full of poems, chapters, verses and stories found after Joyce’s death, it might look something like this.