Coincidance - Principia Discordia

COINCIDANCE: PART TWO
Death and Absence
in James Joyce
... the time is come wherein a man of timid
courage seizes the keys of hell and of death, and
flings them far out into the abyss, proclaiming
the praise of life, which the abiding presence of
truth may sanctify, and of death, the most
beautiful form of life.
The time was 1 February, 1902: the place, the Literary and Historical
Society room in University College, Dublin. The speaker, who would be
twenty years old the following morning, 2 February, was James Joyce; and it
does not take great perspicacity to observe that his style was not yet equal to
the task of containig his vision. Dublin students, who are always great wits,
had a wonderful time parodying "timid courage" in the following days, but
one of them (whose name has been, alas, lost) had even more fun with the
final strophe, satirizing it as "absence, the highest form of presence."
As Richard Ellman has noted, Joyce was no man to back down from a
Paradox, and two of the stories in his first book of fiction, Dubliners, seem
intended to drive home the points that death and absence can be higher and
more beautiful than life and presence. As for "timid courage," that also
remained a theme in everything Joyce wrote.
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