In honor of the snow in Berlin, where I’m spending my Saturday, not a poem, exactly, but one of the most beautiful pieces of prose in the English language: the last paragraph of Joyce’s short story “The Dead.”
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 upon 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.
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How I hated that story when I read it as a freshman in college. How I loved it when I reread it after seeing the brilliant movie. Just! Angelica Huston! The aunts! All the women! But also this paragraph, which is as close to perfect as English prose can be, and also pulls the rest of the story together amazingly.
But also, like so much of the literature that classics-based education assigns to teenagers, it is about being middle-aged and feeling futile, about rethinking your past and realizing that you will also be among the dead under the snow sooner than you would like. (And politics, but I still don’t connect well with the Irish nationalism of the story.) Though I thought I had a sense of mortality by middle school, what I really had was an absence of a sense of my future which took a long time to get over and provided me with no way to get into “The Dead.”
How lovely! Thank you, Becky!