Noticing this morning that our calendar marks the day as Epiphany, and so to various resources to find out more. There was no shortage of religious references in all shapes and flavours. But there was also this:

epiphany, in literature, a sudden revelation of an underlying truth about a person or situation. Taken from the Greek epiphaneia, the manifestation by the gods of their divinities to mortal eyes, the term was first applied to literature by James Joyce, who called his early experimentations with short prose passages “epiphanies”. Such moments of insight form the core of Joyce’s short stories, published in Dubliners (1914)

from Encyclopædia Britannica Micropædia, 1974 edition

which connects more to my mood and tastes. I know it well: to be living in some book or other, caught up, immersed; in thrall. And then to have your head hinge open, light blazing into every nook and cranny. These are the rare “Wow!” moments of the literary epiphany. When you find yourself reading in perfect stride with the author’s telling of the tale; faster as the flow and rhythm of the words direct you; slower when the passage slows you down.

But always inexorably towards that moment when some greater truth will be laid bare before you, and you will sit there, dumbstruck perhaps: “silent, upon a peak in Darien”.

Some writers are more adept at this than others: I have already written of my long-standing admiration for Annie Dillard’s prose. John Berger is another such; Fielding Dawson; and, yes: James Joyce. For it is the ongoing search for further moments of epiphany - the addict’s familiar “just one more” — which fuels the frequent reader’s search…

And so to mark Epiphany, the concluding passage from Joyce’s story The Dead:

The air of the room chilled his shoulders. He stretched himself cautiously along under the sheets and lay down beside his wife. One by one they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age. He thought of how she who lay beside him had locked in her heart for so many years that image of her lover’s eyes when he had told her that he did not wish to live.

Generous tears filled Gabriel’s eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world which these dead had at one time reared and lived in was dissolving and dwindling.

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly on the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, falling softly into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

Damn that’s good!