The King James Version

A religious code, a moral code, a battle code. A dictionary. An encyclopaedia. A treasure chest of sayings, of teachings now its mysteries are unlocked. The mouth of Everyman with their English-speaking tongues. Everyman now a judge, freely opining and interpreting, quoting from.

Picture credit: The Bible, 1845, George Harvey (source: WikiArt).

See The Book of Books by Melvyn Bragg.

From journal, October 2022. 

Nostalgia

Nostalgia is useful. Nostalgia is, in some instances, practical. A fiction I tell myself. For it's not. Nostalgia is rose-tinted and limiting. More sorrowful than perhaps enjoyable, for these people are gone, that time is spent. Nostalgia is a hungriness to see, hear, be with them, or be them again; to be in that buried past, to be that buried self. Undisciplined, it rattles bars. The remembering self wants in but nostalgia can only take you so far; and yet, it can prevent you from focusing on the present and the future. I will understand myself through my past, through my inherited past, forgetting that sometimes to comprehend you have to live.

Picture credit: Nostalgia, Grigoriy Goldstein (source: WikiArt).

From journal, October 2022.

Anguished Youth

In my head I have led many different lives and had many romantic adventures, just as marvellous or as incredible as those in books or on the big screen. I have brooded often upon these dreams and let a strange unrest creep into my soul. I have yearned to meet these images in some way in the real world – but how to seek them? Or have them seek (and find) me? I have each time come to believe that without any act of my own they would encounter me: we would meet as if meant to be, and any doubts I might have held would in that moment fall away. Day after day, silent, watchful … until the madness passes and the heart calms.

I have mirrored, I am still mirroring (at forty-one!) Stephen Dedalus' anguished youth.

Picture credit: James Joyce in 1915  by Alex Ehrenzweig (source: Wikipedia).

See A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce. 

From journal and a larger body of thought on Stephen Dedalus, September 2022.