The Dead

Inspired by a Wall Street Journal article on John Huston’s 1987 adaptation of Joyce’s The Dead, I decided to see if Tivo could snag a copy for me. No luck, and since the WSJ article really was a lament that the Huston film isn’t available on DVD, that wasn’t an option, either.

So I did it one better and dug out my copy of Dubliners. With all the Christmas sitcom’s I’ve been consuming, I needed something more nourishing. Otherwise, I risked a bad case of intellectual scurvy.

And damn. The Dead is brilliant. Each time I read it, I I take away more. There are so many layers, and that aching feeling of mortality the story evokes is the perfect antidote to too much Christmas cheer. Joyce’s conflicted feelings about Ireland. His complicated relationship with Nora. The wonderful view into an Irish Christmas. It all wells up into something so much larger and universal than that one incident early in the 20th Century. This is literature at its greatest.

And the close might be the most incredible string of sentences in the English language. I know it’s quoted too much, but here it is again. Just because:

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, on the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling 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 drifted 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.